Yan Zhang Yan Zhang’s scientific contributions

Impact and torsion pendulums are applied in impulse coupling experiments of high-energy laser irradiation of space debris. It is difficult to achieve a multi-pulse experiment and thus hard to analyze the multi-pulse impulse coupling effect. Here, we designed a new recoil impulse experimental measurement system of non-contact, multidegrees of freedom, and multi-pulse irradiation. The system used a low-pressure and low-temperature vacuum chamber to simulate the space environment, the pinning effect of magnetic levitation to achieve aluminum target suspension, and high-speed cameras to record the displacement over time to calculate the impulse of the target. Then the impulse coupling experiment of multi-pulse laser irradiation on the aluminum target was performed. The result shows that the multi-pulse impulse coupling effect is not the linear accumulation of coupling results by every single-pulse and multi-pulse coefficient that decreases with the increase of the number of pulses, and eventually stabilizes as the decrease gets smaller.

This Letter introduces a trigger-controlled Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode (GM-APD). A hierarchical lookback-upon tree recurrence method is given to predict the performance of trigger-controlled GM-APDs under different trigger-count upper limits. In addition, the normalized detection probability is defined to evaluate the detection performance of trigger-controlled GM-APDs in typical weak optical signal detection (impulse noise and continuous noise situations). Theoretical analyses show that the trigger-controlled GM-APD improves the detection performance of GM-APDs in weak optical signal detection via the optimization of the trigger-count upper limit, compared with single-trigger and multi-trigger GM-APDs.