Improving the performance of ultrafast microchannel-plate photomultipliers in time-correlated photon counting by pulse pre-shaping

With ultrafast microchannel-plate (MCP) photomultipliers that produce subnanosecond pulses, the commercially available circuit modules do not provide a correct constant-fraction trigger (CFT) operation. This has a detrimental effect on the resolution obtained in time-correlated photon counting experiments. In order to circumvent this CFT limitation and better exploit the ultrafast MCP performance, a simple pulse-shaping filter has been devised and experimented with. The filter can be interposed between the MCP output and the input of any commercial CFT module, without modifying the latter. The benefit of the filter is confirmed by the experimental results. With MCP samples that produced awkward resolution curves with satellite peaks and other irregular features, the introduction of the filter regularized and narrowed the curve. Also with a setup having fairly good performance, the introduction of the filter was advantageous: the full width at half maximum (FWHM) resolution improved from 75 to 55 ps.