Oxford Instruments, leading provider of high technology products and services for research and industry, has launched iXon Ultra Blue, a back-illuminated single photon-sensitive EMCCD camera with significantly boosted Quantum Efficiency across the 200 – 450nm wavelength range. Drawing upon decades of market leadership in ultra-sensitive electron multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) technology, the new Andor iXon Ultra Blue camera offers a significant enhancement in QE response across the blue and near-UV range, ideal for cutting-edge applications such as ion trap quantum computing research and semiconductor metrology.
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iXon Ultra Blue employs back-illuminated sensors that also use ‘enhanced silicon’ combined with a UVoptimised AR coatings to yield a significantly enhanced UV-Blue response, up to 63% higher QE than a standard ‘mid-band’ (BV) EMCCD sensor. The QE remains respectably high across the visible and NIR range, rendering the camera a very flexible solution, applicable for example to imaging emission from multiple types of trapped ions or atoms.
iXon Ultra uses Electron Multiplying CCD (EMCCD) technology to amplify signal from even single photon events to well above the read noise floor of the camera, thus rendering single photon sensitivity, even under high speed readout. iXon Ultra is therefore ideally suited to fast detection of extremely weak signal, including single photon counting.
The iXon Ultra platform has been re-engineered to offer stable ‘overclocked’
readout modes, setting a very high bar in terms of frame rates. The frame transfer architecture of the sensor is ideal for efficiency, meaning that the image readout happens while the subsequent image is being exposed, thus avoiding ‘dead time’ or photon wastage. Furthermore, the Crop Mode
allows significantly accelerated frame rates of Region of Interest, for example achieving 697 fps from the iXon Ultra 888 cropped to a 128 x 128 ROI.
iXon Ultra models offer ‘2 in 1’ performance flexibility, in terms of operating as a single photon EMCCD or a low noise conventional CCD, In photon starved applications, choosing the EMCCD amplifier usually yields better signal to noise ratio when under faster frame rates conditions (> 1 fps), whereas often the CCD amplifier can yield better signal to noise ratio when longer exposures can be applied and when the sensor can be read out slowly (i.e. ‘seconds per frame’ rather than ‘frames per second’).
iXon Ultra uses sensor cooling down to -1000C (-950C for 888 model) for minimization of dark current., allowing access to longer exposures, up to several minutes, especially useful in ‘CCD mode’. This broadens the application flexibility of this model, making it ideal for long exposure luminescence measurements and astrophotometry.
The iXon Ultra platform comes loaded with smart camera features:
Measure fluorescence signal from a few atom MOT, as individual atoms enter and leave trap
The iXon Ultra Blue is the world’s most sensitive detector of blue and near UV photons, combining single photon sensitivity with significantly enhanced QE across the 200 – 450nm range. As such it is ideally suited to imaging of ion trap quantum systems, especially for ions such as Ytterbium (370nm), Magnesium (285nm) or Strontium (422nm).
iXon Ultra Blue also delivers fast rapid imaging speeds, especially when using Crop mode to enormously boost sub-region (region of interest) frame rates. Furthermore, the platform also offers a Camera Link Output which can be harnessed to minimize data transfer latency, ideal for feedback loop experimental systems.
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