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Rochester Institute of Technology to build noiseless detector for
$2.8 million

October 23, 2008--The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation recently
awarded Rochester Institute of
Technology (Rochester, NY) US$2.8 million to design, develop, and build a
zero-noise detector for the future Thirty Meter Telescope. Expected to be
operational in the next decade, the telescope's light-collecting power will be
ten times that of the largest telescopes now in operation.

The detector's new sensing technology promises to penetrate the darkness of
space with the greatest sensitivity ever. It could also have applications on
Earth to improve everything from cell phone cameras to secure communications and
surveillance systems. Director of RIT's Imaging Detector Laboratory, Donald
Figer, will lead the project.

Imaging sensors produce a"noisy" signal that often degrades images,
especially under low-light conditions. The noise can sometimes be seen as the
grainy, salt-and-pepper speckling found in pictures snapped in a dark room. In
applications like astrophysics, that noise can do more than ruin a picture; it
can mean the difference between making a discovery or not.

According to Figer, the zero-noise detector employed with the Thirty Meter
Telescope will have the same sensitivity as a combination of today's detectors
and a 60-meter telescope for probing the farthest reaches of the universe. "You
could quadruple the power of a telescope just by using this detector," says
Figer. "Or you can do the same thing by making a telescope twice the size, but
then we're talking a cost of billions of dollars and taking on a monumental
engineering challenge."

"Don's detector research represents a technological leap forward for
astrophysics and for a variety of industrial and commercial applications, as
well," says RIT president Bill Destler. "The Rochester Imaging Detector
Laboratory was established at RIT with the help of the New York State Foundation
for Science, Technology, and Innovation. In just three years, it has gained
stature as an epicenter for imaging innovation."

Figer will lead a team of scientists from RIT and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's Lincoln Laboratory (Lexington, MA) to create a detector unlike any
available today. "This detector will have more earthly applications too. For
instance, you'll be able to see things in low-light conditions, especially from
twilight down to the darkness of the darkest night," Figer says. "For some
applications, it will be the difference between seeing nothing and seeing
everything."

The technological breakthrough promising to pierce the darkness of space
hinges on resolving the pesky problem of noise. Noise limits all existing
detectors--whether in a point-and-shoot camera, a video camera, or a detector
attached to a telescope. A product of the device itself, noise is present in the
random signals detectors generate, but especially disruptive under low-light
conditions. The random signal, also known as "detector read noise," muddles
images shot in poor lighting.

Designing a device using a digital photon counter to detect every single
photon coming from a target can circumvent the problem. To do this, Figer and
his colleagues will adapt prototype technologies developed at Lincoln Laboratory
that already have some of the basic circuitry required to detect a single
quantum of light. These circuits are currently used for LIDAR applications that
detect pulses of light or bunches of photons.

"What we're trying to do is to detect single photons, each producing a much
smaller pulse than the big packet of photons in the LIDAR applications," Figer
says. "So, we're going to have to go back to the basic engineering and figure
out the things that need to be modified in the design to make it more capable of
detecting single photons."

Figer will test the new detector at cryogenic temperatures in the Rochester
Imaging Detector Laboratory. Cooling the device to lower temperatures will
freeze its dark current, another potential source of noise, and keep it stuck in
the crystal lattice like flies on flypaper and away from the conduction
band.

In the second phase of the project, Figer's team will adapt the detector
technology to infrared applications, replacing silicon with indium gallium
arsenide (InGaAs). The infrared version of the detector will give
astrophysicists the ability to peer through cosmic dust and also to detect stars
in the early universe.

RELATED ARTICLES:

APD Arrays:
Geiger-mode APD arrays detect low light

Feb. 2008:
Foundation funds 30-meter telescope

Thu Oct 23 09:38:00 CDT 2008

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