Seminar at PAG - Single Photon Detectors for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory

Prof. Don Figer from Rochester Institute of Technology, USA, visited PAG and introduced his work on detectors for astrophysics and for exoplanets characterization.
Here is the abstract of his presentation :

NASA’s Habitable World Observatory (HWO) will observe faint sources in ultralow (photon-per-hour) backgrounds. In this talk, we present NASA-funded research to advance single-photon counting and radiation-tolerant CMOS detectors for NASA missions, in particular, those requiring optical/UV photon-counting detectors. In the project, we will measure the performance of Fairchild Imaging large-format single photon counting and photon number resolving CMOS imaging detectors (HWK4123) before and after radiation that simulates the environment at L2. These detectors have very low capacitance sense nodes to produce a large voltage response to a single photon. In a predecessor project, we found that performance for a similar detector (QIS, Gigajot Technologies) is little-changed after exposure to 50 krad(Si). The dark current can be set to beginning-of-life levels with modest additional cooling, 4–6 K for an 11-year mission. The project seeks to minimize the transient and long-term effects of radiation in NASA missions and also to design a single photon counting and photon number resolving NIR detector with similar architecture.