THE SILICON PHOTOMULTIPLIER — A NEW DETECTOR FOR SINGLE PHOTON-NUMBER-RESOLVING AT ROOM TEMPERATURE

A new type of single photon detector, silicon photomultiplier (SiPM), — which has photon-number-resolving capability at room temperature, was introduced. The SiPM is composed of hundreds to thousands of Geiger mode avalanche photo-diodes (GAPD) pixels in size from several to several tens of microns integrated in one silicon chip. The SiPM can resolve the photon-number of a short light pulse by spatial multiplexing. The influence of relative high dark count rate on the quantum bit error rate (QBER) can be mitigated greatly by gating detection events and slightly cooling the detector. The key parameters of SiPM were demonstrated and the results show that the SiPM can reach the requirements for quantum information processing and applications.