Microchannel plate cross-talk mitigation for spatial autocorrelation measurements

Microchannel plate cross-talk mitigation for spatial autocorrelation measurements

Citation

Lipka, M., Parniak, M., & Wasilewski, W. (2018). Microchannel plate cross-talk mitigation for spatial autocorrelation measurements. arXiv, 1–7. This citation is formatted according to APA style.

Keywords

  • Microchannel plate (MCP)
  • Cross-talk
  • Second-order intensity autocorrelation function (g(2)(r))
  • I-sCMOS camera
  • Image intensifier
  • Single-photon level
  • Pseudo-thermal light
  • Dark counts
  • Spatial autocorrelation measurements
  • Cross-correlation measurements
  • Quantum optics

Brief

A new method mitigates cross-talk between microchannels of a microchannel plate (MCP), which is used in spatially-resolved single-particle detectors, to enable the measurement of light's second-order intensity autocorrelation function, g(2)(r). 

Summary

Microchannel plates (MCPs) are integral to single-particle detectors but suffer from cross-talk between their microchannels, hindering spatial characterization. This article presents a method for cross-talk subtraction, experimentally demonstrated by measuring the second-order intensity autocorrelation function (g(2)) of pseudo-thermal light at the single-photon level using an I-sCMOS camera.

  • Cross-talk arises when secondary emission electrons scatter back into the MCP, triggering an additional avalanche in a distant microchannel and creating artificial correlations in photon counts.
  • The method uses dark count measurements to calibrate and quantify the radial cross-talk probability distribution.
  • Assuming a linear relationship between the total cross-talk coincidences and photon counts, a corrected g(2) is obtained by removing a proportion of measured coincidences.
  • Validation using pseudo-thermal light shows the corrected autocorrelation agrees with reference cross-correlation and theoretical predictions.
  • The method is applicable to any MCP-based application.
  • This technique simplifies experimental setups by enabling autocorrelation measurements in a single MCP region, enhancing spatial characterization for quantum information processing technologies.

The article concludes that this method allows for autocorrelation measurements on the single-excitation level, simplifying experimental setups and improving spatial characterization in quantum optics and other fields.

Origin: https://www.semanticscholar.org/reader/d13322fa952c64743322cafaae39c5cfb0be4d4a

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