Photon counting strategies with low-light-level CCDs

Low light level charge-coupled devices (L3CCDs) have recently been developed, incorporating on-chip gain. They may be operated to give an effective readout noise of much less than one electron by implementing an on-chip gain process allowing the detection of individual photons. However, the gain mechanism is stochastic and so introduces significant extra noise into the system. In this paper we examine how best to process the output signal from an L3CCD so as to minimize the contribution of stochastic noise, while still maintaining photometric accuracy. We achieve this by optimizing a transfer function that translates the digitized output signal levels from the L3CCD into a value approximating the photon input as closely as possible by applying thresholding techniques. We identify several thresholding strategies and quantify their impact on the photon counting accuracy and the effective signal-to-noise ratio. We find that it is possible to eliminate the noise introduced by the gain process at the lowest light levels. Reduced improvements are achieved as the light level increases up to about 20 photon pixel(-1) and above this there is negligible improvement. Operating L3CCDs at very high speeds will keep the photon flux low, giving the best improvements in signal-to-noise ratio.