Low-Timing-Jitter Single-Photon Detection Using 1-GHz Sinusoidally Gated InGaAs/InP Avalanche Photodiode

We demonstrate an efficient way to improve the timing jitter of sine-wave gated InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiode (APD) by combining sinusoidally balanced differencing and low-pass filtering techniques to minimize detrimental waveform distortion of the avalanche signal, and realize a 1-GHz gated InGaAs/InP single-photon detector with the timing jitter as low as 60 ps. The detection efficiency could reach 10.4% at 1550 nm with the maximum count rate similar to 100 MHz, afterpulse probability similar to 3.0%, and dark count rate similar to 6.1 x 10(-6) per gate. Such low timing jitter single-photon detectors offer facility for quantum key distribution at gigahertz clock rate.