Imaging of light is widespread in our everyday life, ranging from the human vision that allows us to continuously acquire information about the surrounding environment, to cheap consumer cameras in mobile devices, up to very expensive top-grade scientific instruments.
The quantum nature of light implies the existence of an ultimate detection limit: the single photon. The complete information about the incoming light source is obtained if we are able to detect every single photon with ultimate precision in terms of combined spatial and temporal information. If we could also gain information about wavelength and polarization then we would know everything about the incoming radiation. Unfortunately, a detector with “ultimate” features, such as high single-photon detection efficiency in a wide spectral range, with low dark counts and excellent timing and position resolutions does not exist.
The 4DPHOTON project addresses this specific issue and aims at the development of a single photon detector with performances beyond the state-of-the-art.
The 4DPHOTON project will have important applications allowing significant advances in different research fields where excellent timing and position resolutions are simultaneously required.
This detector will allow, for example, to face the experimental challenges foreseen in future high-energy physics experiments, which have an ever-increasing demand for timing resolution, granularity and rate capabilities, in environments with very high particles intensities. The detector can also be employed in life science applications for example in fluorescence lifetime imaging for time-correlated single-photon counting measurements. The 4DPHOTON detector, with its data-driven architecture, does not need gating to achieve the desired timing resolution and is always active, avoiding losing photons and increasing the measurement sensitivity.
In conclusion, thanks to its performances, the 4DPHOTON detector has the potential of opening new research paths not only in physics but also in life sciences and other emerging fields.
