Data acquisition card for fluctuation correlation spectroscopy allowing full access to the detected photon sequence

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Abstract
Typically, fluctuation correlation spectroscopy (FCS) data acquisition cards measure the number of photon events per time interval (i.e., bin)—time mode. Commercial FCS cards combine the bins through hardware in order to calculate the autocorrelation function. Such a design therefore does not yield the time resolved photon sequence, but only the autocorrelation of that sequence. A different acquisition method which measures the number of time intervals between photon events has been implemented—photon mode. This method takes advantage of the fact that in FCS the rate of photon counts is much less than the frequency of the clock that is used to determine the temporal location of the photons. By using this new mode of data acquisition, the current card design allows for 25 ns time resolution. The data acquisition card can operate in both time and photon mode and yields the time resolved sequence of photon arrivals in both cases. Therefore, the data is available for analysis by any method(s), such as but not limited to, autocorrelation, photon counting histogram, and higher order autocorrelation.