Links to Detectors and other photon counting sources are provided as a convenience. Marina Photonics has confidence that the end user can discern fact from specs spin. Marina Photonics specializes in sustained Gigahertz Gated TCSPC Photon Counting that is AFFORDABLE!
Dead time is the time when a photon arrives and is not counted.
This might occur for overlapping photons or photons separated by very short times, for all (First In First Out shift register buffer memories) FIFO systems once the FIFO is filled, the time to reset the time system, pulses that are too narrow to count, or quantum detection efficiency loss.
TTL photon counting output devices often have 10 ns pulse-widths creating 10ns dead times. Not being able to count during output to a computer is also dead time. Alternating Counters in a photon counter always have dead time.
Beware of SSD After-Pulse detector rates that increase with quantum efficiency which have long recovery dead times.
Many 'Photon Counters' are just detectors with an amplifier-discriminator and TTL pulse out that don't 'count' at all. Time Correlated Single Photon Counters (TCSPC) are boards for computers, NIM (Nuclear Instrumentation Modules) for NIM bins, USB units, or Stand-Alone systems that timestamp photon arrival or put photons in time correlated bins
Marina Photonics supplies loss-free 1.6 GHz time-correlated single photon counting to bins with lossless SUSTAINED 400 Megabyte/second USB3 computer input.
The first few entries BELOW are time-taggers followed by the new Superconducting Nanowire detectors and other photon counters. It is easy to count photons, but the real problem is to get them into a system where the data are useful
Stanford Research Systems SR430 is available In-house for photon counting comparisons, but the SR430 is out of production.The SR430 cannot reliably see sub-nanosecond width photon pulses, but the PV16 and P1TTL can stretch the pulse to reliable widths for use with the SR430. https://www.thinksrs.com/
Perkin Elmer sold Gigahertz Photon Detection modules that combined a detector and ADC. I have not found the link to the module and the product note is copyright 2009The following links do not seem to work anymore
Perkin Elmer "Photon Detection" analog and digital https://resources.perkinelmer.com/corporate/pdfs/downloads/dts_photodiodemodulesreceiverforanalyticalmolecularapplications.pdf
