Receiver Performance of CO2 and CH4 Lidar with Low Noise HgCdTe Avalanche Photodiodes

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is currently developing CO2 lidars at 1.57 μm wavelength for the Active Sensing of CO2 Emission over Days, Nights, and Seasons (ASCENDS) mission. One of the major technical challenges is the photodetectors that have to operate in short wave infrared (SWIR) wavelength region and sensitive to received laser pulses of only a few photons. We have been using InGaAs photocathode photomultiplier tubes (PMT) in our airborne simulator of the CO2 lidar that can detect single photon with up to 10% quantum efficiency at <1.6 μm wavelength. However it was difficult to maintain a sufficiently wide signal dynamic range and single photon sensitivity at the same time with the PMTs. There may also be a lifetime limitation with the InGaAs photocathode PMT for a multi-year space mission. We have been developing HgCdTe avalanche photodiode (APD) SWIR detector systems with DRS Technologies, Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition (RSTA) Division as an alternative photodetector for our CO2 lidars. The new HgCdTe APDs have typically a >50% quantum efficiency, including the effect of fill-factor, from 0.9 to 4.5 μm wavelength. DRS RSTA will integrate a low noise read-out integrated circuit (ROIC) with the HgCdTe APD array into a low noise analog SWIR detector with near single photon sensitivity. The new HgCdTe APD SWIR detector assembly is expected to improve the receiver sensitivity of our CO2 lidar by at least a factor of two and provide a sufficient wide signal dynamic range. The new SWIR detector systems can also be used in the CH4 lidars at 1.65 μm wavelength currently being developed at GSFC. The near infrared PMTs have diminishing quantum efficiency as the wavelength exceeds 1.6 μm. InGaAs APDs have a high quantum efficiency but too high an excess noise factor to achieve near quantum limited performance. The new HgCdTe APDs is expected to give a much superior performance than the PMTs and the InGaAs APDs. In this paper, we will give a brief description of the new HgCdTe APD assembly and present a receiver performance analysis of our CO2 lidar and a CH4 lidar with the new detector system in comparison to the near infrared PMTs and InGaAs APDs.