Fabrication and performance characterization of 1550 nm hetero-multiplication avalanche photodiodes for single photons detection

We report the fabrication and performance characterization of 1550 nm separate absorption, grading, charge, and InP/InAlAs hetro-multiplication avalanche photodiodes (SAGCHM APDs) for single photon detection applications. The linear mode performance of the fabricated APDs are firstly characterized that the dark current at 95% of the breakdown voltage was 30 pA and 15 nA at 200K and 300K, respectively. The gain-bandwidth product of 62 GHz was obtained at room temperature. For single photons detection characterization, however, our APD was operated in the gated passive quenching mode, at lower temperature and incorporated with an optimizing spike-cancellation self-differencing circuit. Under the temperature of -50°C and the gate repetition frequency of 100 KHz with pulse width of 2 ns, the lowest dark count probability (Pdc) of 1.2 x 10-5, the highest single-photon detection efficiency (ηdet) of 22.5%, and the lowest noise equivalent power (NEP) of 1.5x10-15 W/(Hz)1/2 were obtained, respectively. Moreover, we demonstrated the transmission distance as a function of quantum bit error rate (QBER) based on the obtained performance parameters. The maximum transmission distance, at QBER=15%, of 43 km was achieved.

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