Research On Single-photon Detection And Imaging Of Dynamic Targets Based On Infrared Up-conversion

Infrared photon detection has many applications in environmental remote sensing,biological imaging,astronomical observation,and night vision imaging.However,existing commercially available infrared band imaging devices suffer from low detection sensitivity,slow response time and susceptibility to background interference,limiting their application in detecting faint light in extreme environments.In contrast,silicon-based sensors in the visible band,especially silicon-based single-photon detectors,have high detection efficiency,low dark count,low power consumption,and low time jitter,enabling high sensitive imaging on a single-photon scale.Therefore,converting photons from infrared band to visible band for detection and imaging using high-performance visual detectors is a practical technical route to enhance infrared imaging performance.Since1968,when J.E.Midwinter et al.demonstrated up-conversion imaging from near-infrared to visible wavelengths using lithium niobate crystals at the Royal Radar Institute in Malvern,UK,this technology obtained continued attention.In recent years,researchers have developed parametric mode sorting and gated filtering technologies based on up-conversion imaging,which effectively improve the imaging practicability in strong background environment.However,existing infrared up-conversion single-photon imaging still uses traditional photon counting techniques,which suffer from long integration times,poor resistance to background noise,and an inability to respond to high-frequency information.This paper proposes a passive infrared up-conversion single photon imaging method based on quantum compression sensing,which can directly obtain dynamic information of high-frequency scintillation infrared target signals.Converting the target signal photons from infrared to the visible spectral region enables sensitive infrared single-photon detection using a high-performance visible single-photon detector.The infrared target signal is imaged with frequency domain features,effectively shielding spurious signals and improving the imaging signal-to-back ratio.The main features and innovations of this paper are the following:This paper proposes a passive infrared up-conversion single-photon imaging method based on quantum compression sensing based on nonlinear frequency up-conversion technology,which can directly obtain the characteristic spectral information of high-frequency scintillation targets,and the imaging method has the characteristics of high-speed response,no cooling,and low inherent noise.By using this method to image the infrared target signal with frequency domain features,the background noise does not have spectral characteristics and has a white noise distribution in the frequency domain,then the signal can be distinguished from the background by frequency domain transformation,which significantly improves the imaging signal-to-noise ratio.The experiment achieves the feature spectrum extraction of high-frequency scintillation targets at the GHz level,and the imaging signal-to-background ratio reaches 1: 100.