Evolution of locally excited avalanches in semiconductors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that semiconductor avalanche photodiodes can produce extremely low noise during initial avalanche development, enabling precise charge resolution and advancing toward noiseless solid-state amplification.

Contribution

It introduces a method to observe low-noise avalanche evolution, paving the way for solid-state noiseless amplifiers and improved charge resolution techniques.

Findings

Avalanche noise is significantly reduced during early evolution.

Number of seed charges can be resolved in real-time.

Potential for developing noiseless solid-state amplifiers.

Abstract

We show that semiconductor avalanche photodiodes can exhibit diminutive amplification noise during the early evolution of avalanches. The noise is so low that the number of locally excited charges that seed each avalanche can be resolved. These findings constitute an important first step towards realization of a solid-state noiseless amplifier. Moreover, we believe that the experimental setup used, \textit{i.e.}, time-resolving locally excited avalanches, will become a useful tool for optimizing the number resolution.