AUTOCORRELATION CENTRAL HOLE ESTIMATES IN NONLINEAR PHOTON-COUNTING DETECTORS

In an experiment in which two or more photoevents arriving at the same pixel are considered a single count, a one-pixel-size central hole ap pears in the autocorrelation estimate. This hole is a source of error when high-resolution techniques based on the autocorrelation function are applied to image or signal recovery. We present an experimental me thod to evaluate the autocorrelation central hole based on the nonline ar behavior of the total number of counts per frame when clipped photo count distributions are considered. The technique is easy to perform a nd provides high accuracy. (C) 1995 Optical Society of America