Solid State Photon-Counters for High Time Resolution Astrophysics (HTRA)

The needs to have detector systems capable to push the time tagging capabilities of each incoming photon toward the 10 ps region, sustaining up to 1GHz count rates continuously for hours of uninterrupted acquisition have generated a new type of investigation on detectors and electronic front-end that can be able to satisfy these requirements. For example, thanks to such extremely high time resolution and stability, and to the photon flux at the output of the future 40-m class telescopes as the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), these new instruments could study second order correlation functions in the photon stream from celestial sources in their different manifestations (statistical characteristics of the photon stream, photon correlation spectroscopy, Hanbury-Brown\u2013Twiss intensity interferometry over two or more apertures). To investigate the real possibilities of such devices, we studied and characterized different detectors produced by various manufacturers. Some results particularly focused on timing resolution and photo detection efficiency will be presented. Finally a brief discussion on recent developments in that field is also presented