The blocking probability of Geiger-mode avalanche photo-diodes

When a photon is detected by a Geiger-mode avalanche photo-diode (GMAPD), the detector is rendered inactive, or blocked, for a certain period of time. In this paper we derive the blocking probability for a GMAPD whose input is either an unmodulated, Bernoulli modulated or pulse-position-modulated (PPM) Poisson process. We demonstrate how the PPM and Bernoulli cases differ, illustrating that the PPM blocking probability is larger than the Bernoulli. The blocking rates may be decreased by focusing the incident light on an array of detectors. We show that the binomial output statistics of an array of GMAPDs may be modeled as Poisson and measure the error in this approximation via the relative entropies of the two distributions.