P. Zoccarato

Iqueye, a single photon-counting photometer applied to the ESO new technology telescope

Context. A new extremely high speed photon-counting photometer, Iqueye, has been installed and tested at the New Technology Telescope, in La Silla. Aims. This instrument is the second prototype of a “quantum” photometer being developed for future Extremely Large Telescopes of 30–50 m aperture. Methods. Iqueye divides the telescope aperture into four portions, each feeding a single photon avalanche diode. The counts from the four channels are collected by a time-to-digital converter board, where each photon is appropriately time-tagged. Owing to a rubidium oscillator and a GPS receiver, an absolute rms timing accuracy better than 0.5 ns during one-hour observations is achieved. The system can sustain a count rate of up to 8 MHz uninterruptedly for an entire night of observation. Results. During five nights of observations, the system performed smoothly, and the observations of optical pulsar calibration targets provided excellent results.

AquEYE, a single photon counting photometer for astronomy

This paper describes the results obtained so far with AquEYE, a single photon counting, fixed aperture photometer for the Asiago 182 cm telescope. AquEYE has been conceived as a prototype of a truly ‘quantum’ photometer for future Extremely Large Telescopes of 30–50 m aperture. This prototype is characterized by four independent channels equipped with single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs) as detectors. The counts from the four channels are acquired by a TDC board which has a nominal 25 ps time tagging capability. Taking into account the 35 ps jitter in the SPAD itself, the overall precision of the time tags is of the order of 50 ps. The internal oscillator is locked to an external rubidium clock; a GPS pulse per second is collected by the TDC itself to obtain a UTC reference. The maximum photon count rate which the present system can sustain is 12 MHz.

Optical phase coherent timing of the Crab nebula pulsar with Iqueye at the ESO New Technology Telescope

The Crab nebula pulsar was observed in 2009 January and December with a novel very fast optical photon counter, Iqueye, mounted at the ESO 3.5 m New Technology Telescope. Thanks to the exquisite quality of the Iqueye data, we computed accurate phase coherent timing solutions for the two observing runs and over the entire year 2009. Our statistical uncertainty on the determination of the phase of the main pulse and the rotational period of the pulsar for short (a few days) time intervals are

The optical light curve of the LMC pulsar B0540-69 in 2009

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Upgrade of Iqueye, a novel photon-counting photometer for the ESO New Technology Telescope

s and ~0.5 ps, respectively. Comparison with the Jodrell Bank radio ephemerides shows that the optical pulse leads the radio one by ~240

Aqueye+: a new ultrafast single photon counter for optical high time resolution astrophysics

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The Crab pulsar seen with AquEYE at Asiago Cima Ekar observatory

s in January and ~160

First Results of AQuEye, a Precursor ‘Quantum’ Instrument for the E-ELT

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The optical light curve of the Large Magellanic Cloud pulsar B0540−69 in 2009

s in December, in agreement with a number of other measurements performed after 1996. A third-order polynomial fit adequately describes the spin-down for the 2009 January plus December optical observations. The phase noise is consistent with being Gaussian distributed with a dispersion

The optical light curve of the Large Magellanic Cloud pulsar B0540−69 in 2009: The optical light curve of the PSR B0540−69

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