Photonics Applications for Quantum Imaging, Quantum Computing and more

Hamamatsu Corporation @ Optatec 2022! The company’s philosophy is: “We explore light and use our discoveries to develop new products, with the aim of uncovering unexplored secrets and creating new future industries.”

And it is in this spirit that Michael Kehr, Senior Sales Engineer, explains to the audience the trade fair highlight for Optatec 2022 – the ORCA-Quest! The camera is able to resolve the number of photoelectrons using a newly developed special technology.

Light is an accumulation of many photons. The photons are converted into electrons on the sensor, and these electrons are called photoelectrons. Photon count resolution is a method of accurately measuring light by counting photoelectrons. In order to count these photoelectrons, the camera noise must be sufficiently smaller than the amount of photoelectron signal.

“That’s why we dimmed the camera extremely to the lowest signal ranges and it can be seen here that the camera can still evaluate a quantitative signal even in the low photon number range.”

So the camera will be used in applications that have extremely low light levels, such as high-speed fluorescence microscopy, but also very innovative applications such as quantum imaging, quantum computing with single atoms and extremely sensitive laser applications.