The present article describes an indigenous design of microcontroller-based photon counter, which is capable of counting the pulses up to maximum of 5 MHz rate. For this purpose, the short-duration pulses received have been broaden to make it compatible with the counter. The developed photon counter has been tested for its functionality to count the number of photons in a specified time bin at different values of PMT voltage, discriminator threshold and light intensity. The analysis of these parameters has a strong resemblance to that of commercial (SR400) gated photon counter. A LabVIEW-based program has been developed to acquire data continuously at different input parameters along with simultaneous monitoring of photon count variation. The developed photon counter design can be used in numerous applications for low-rate photon counting. One of the applications to study the intensity decay of phosphorescence material has been reported in this article.

本文介绍了一种基于微控制器的光子计数器的本地设计，该计数器能够对最大5 MHz速率的脉冲进行计数。为此目的，已将接收到的短时脉冲加宽以使其与计数器兼容。已开发出的光子计数器经过了功能测试，可以对指定时间仓中PMT电压，鉴别器阈值和光强度的不同值下的光子数量进行计数。这些参数的分析与商用（SR400）门控光子计数器的分析非常相似。已经开发了一个基于LabVIEW的程序，可以在不同的输入参数下连续采集数据，并同时监视光子数变化。发达的光子计数器设计可用于低速率光子计数的众多应用中。