Part of the book: Coherence and Ultrashort Pulse Laser Emission
Part of the book: Photodiodes
Part of the book: Laser Pulses
As the requisite optical components in quantum information processing, single-photon detectors of high performance at the near-infrared wavelengths are in urgent need. In this paper, we review our recent development in high-speed single-photon detection with avalanche photodiodes, increasing the working repetition frequency up to GHz. Ingenious techniques, such as capacitance-balancing, self-differencing, low-pass filtering, and frequency up-conversion, were employed to achieve high-speed single-photon detection with high detection efficiency and low error counts, offering facility for many important applications, such as laser ranging and imaging, quantum key distribution at GHz clock rate.
Part of the book: Optoelectronics
Ultrafast optics has been a rich research field, and picosecond/femtosecond pulsed laser sources seek many applications in both the areas of fundamental research and industrial life. Much attention has been attached to fiber lasers in recent decades as they offering various superiorities over their solid-state counterparts with compact size, low cost, and great stability due to the inherent stability and safety of the waveguide structures as well as high photoelectric conversion efficiency. Fiber-based sources of ultrashort and high-peak/high-average optical pulses have become extremely important for high-precision laser processing while sources whose carrier-envelop offset and repetition rate are stabilized can serve as laser combs with applications covering many research areas, such as precision spectroscopy, optical clock, and optical frequency metrology. For the application as laser combs, four parts as fiber laser, broadband supercontinuum, nonlinear power amplification, and repetition rate stabilization must be concerned. This chapter is intended to give a brief introduction about the achievement of the four technologies mentioned above with different experimental setups, recently developed such as divided-pulse amplification (DPA) in emphasize. Moreover, detailed descriptions of the experimental constructions as well as theoretical analyses about the phenomena they produced are also involved.
Part of the book: High Energy and Short Pulse Lasers