Science
In reply to the discussion: Quantum Entanglement, Dark Counts, Coincidence Detection [View all]caraher
(6,278 posts)The setup described at Whitman does exactly that - you get singles rates as well as the coincidences. The FPGA basically counts for as little as 100 ms, then sends a burst on the serial cable with I think up to 8 channels of count data, up to 4 channels of "raw" counts and up to 4 channels of user-selectable coincidence counts.
Your electronics don't really need to be heroically fast just to count singles - the SPCM pulses are, I think, a few tens of ns long, and you get something like 50 ns of deadtime following each count, and you'll never see a rate exceeding 10-15 MHz. As long as you can pick up the leading edge of a TTL pulse that wide you should be fine. So yeah, your microcontroller is probably too slow to actually do the counting directly, but some fairly simple digital electronics can feed it your counts at some manageable intervals.