March 10, 2005, Geneva, Switzerland and Berlin, Germany--Id Quantique (Geneva, Switzerland) and Becker & Hickl (Berlin, Germany) have entered into a strategic partnership to cooperate in the field of single photon detection for life science applications.
After a thorough evaluation of id Quantique's id100-20 module, the company's latest single photon counter for the visible range, Becker & Hickl has decided to offer this innovative product to its customer base. The id100-20 will complement Becker & Hickl's extensive product portfolio in the field of single photon detectors. Becker & Hickl has identified the id100-20 as a real alternative to micro-channel plates and photomultiplier tubes, thanks to its extremely low jitter of 40 ps and its excellent timing stability up to count rates of at least 10 MHz. Both companies will cooperate to provide attractive solutions for applications such as single-molecule spectroscopy, time-resolved confocal microscopy, fluorescence lifetime measurements and laser testing. The collaboration will also cover the development of custom single photon counter arrays.
id Quantique operates as a privately held company headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Complementing its network security activities, id Quantique has a growing optical instrumentation business, where the company's core Quantum Photonics technologies provide innovative solutions for industrial, commercial and research applications. The company's product offering includes photon-counters for the visible and infrared regions of the optical spectrum, as well as short-pulse laser sources. These products are used in medical/environmental instrumentation, quantum optics, aerospace and defense applications.
Becker & Hickl is the leader in advanced time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) techniques. Founded in 1993, the product range of Becker & Hickl includes various steady-state-photon counters, multichannel scalers down to a resolution of 1 ns, TCSPC devices with a time-channel width down to 800 fs, picosecond diode lasers, and a large number of detector modules and detector assemblies. With the development of multi-dimensional TCSPC techniques, the introduction of a fast time-conversion principle, and the combination of histogramming and single-photon correlation techniques, Becker & Hickl provided the technical basis of modern TCSPC-based fluorescence lifetime microscopy, diffuse optical tomography, single-molecule spectroscopy, and other biomedical fluorescence applications.