Indigenous Design and Development of Gated Photon Counter for Low-Rate Photon Regime

摘要

The present article describes an indigenous design of microcontroller-based photon counter, which is capable of counting the pulses up to maximum of 5 MHz rate. For this purpose, the short-duration pulses received have been broaden to make it compatible with the counter. The developed photon counter has been tested for its functionality to count the number of photons in a specified time bin at different values of PMT voltage, discriminator threshold and light intensity. The analysis of these parameters has a strong resemblance to that of commercial (SR400) gated photon counter. A LabVIEW-based program has been developed to acquire data continuously at different input parameters along with simultaneous monitoring of photon count variation. The developed photon counter design can be used in numerous applications for low-rate photon counting. One of the applications to study the intensity decay of phosphorescence material has been reported in this article.