Characterisation of a novel reverse-biased PPD CMOS image sensor

A new pinned photodiode (PPD) CMOS image sensor (CIS) has been developed and characterised. The sensor can be fully depleted by means of reverse bias applied to the substrate, and the principle of operation is applicable to very thick sensitive volumes. Additional n-type implants under the pixel p-wells, called Deep Depletion Extension (DDE), have been added in order to eliminate the large parasitic substrate current that would otherwise be present in a normal device. The first prototype has been manufactured on a 18 μm thick, 1000 Ω .cm epitaxial silicon wafers using 180 nm PPD image sensor process at TowerJazz Semiconductor. The chip contains arrays of 10 μm and 5.4 μm pixels, with variations of the shape, size and the depth of the DDE implant. Back-side illuminated (BSI) devices were manufactured in collaboration with Teledyne e2v, and characterised together with the front-side illuminated (FSI) variants. The presented results show that the devices could be reverse-biased without parasitic leakage currents, in good agreement with simulations. The new 10 μm pixels in both BSI and FSI variants exhibit nearly identical photo response to the reference non-modified pixels, as characterised with the photon transfer curve. Different techniques were used to measure the depletion depth in FSI and BSI chips, and the results are consistent with the expected full depletion

Spectral stability for subsonic traveling pulses of the Boussinesq `abc' system

We consider the spectral stability of certain traveling wave solutions of the Boussinesq `abc' system. More precisely, we consider the explicit $sech^2(x)$ like solutions of the form (\vp(x-w t), \psi(x- w t)=(\vp, const. \vp), exhibited by M. Chen (1998) and we provide a complete rigorous characterization of the spectral stability in all cases for which $a=c0$

e2v CMOS and CCD sensors and systems for astronomy

e2v designs and manufactures a wide range of sensors for space and astronomy applications. This includes high performance CCDs for X-ray, visible and near-IR wavelengths. In this paper we illustrate the maturity of CMOS capability for these applications; examples are presented together with performance data. The majority of e2v sensors for these applications are back-thinned for highest spectral response and designed for very low read-out noise; the combination delivers high signal to noise ratio in association with a variety of formats and package designs. The growing e2v capability in delivery of sub-systems and cryogenic cameras is illustrated—including the 1.2 Giga-pixel J-PAS camera system

Quantitative Photo-acoustic Tomography with Partial Data

Photo-acoustic tomography is a newly developed hybrid imaging modality that combines a high-resolution modality with a high-contrast modality. We analyze the reconstruction of diffusion and absorption parameters in an elliptic equation and improve an earlier result of Bal and Uhlmann to the partial date case. We show that the reconstruction can be uniquely determined by the knowledge of 4 internal data based on well-chosen partial boundary conditions. Stability of this reconstruction is ensured if a convexity condition is satisfied. Similar stability result is obtained without this geometric constraint if 4n well-chosen partial boundary conditions are available, where $n$ is the spatial dimension. The set of well-chosen boundary measurements is characterized by some complex geometric optics (CGO) solutions vanishing on a part of the boundary.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0910.250

Non-Locality of Experimental Qutrit Pairs

The insight due to John Bell that the joint behavior of individually measured entangled quantum systems cannot be explained by shared information remains a mystery to this day. We describe an experiment, and its analysis, displaying non-locality of entangled qutrit pairs. The non-locality of such systems, as compared to qubit pairs, is of particular interest since it potentially opens the door for tests of bipartite non-local behavior independent of probabilistic Bell inequalities, but of deterministic nature

Experimental Demonstration of Decoherence-Free One-Way Information Transfer

We report the experimental demonstration of a one-way quantum protocol reliably operating in the presence of decoherence. Information is protected by designing an appropriate decoherence-free subspace for a cluster state resource. We demonstrate our scheme in an all-optical setup, encoding the information into the polarization states of four photons. A measurement-based one-way information-transfer protocol is performed with the photons exposed to severe symmetric phase-damping noise. Remarkable protection of information is accomplished, delivering nearly ideal outcomes.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, RevTeX