PicoQuant has released the HydraHarp 400 Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting system under the GNU Linux operating system.
The library is fully API compatible with the corresponding library for Windows. It comes as a shared library supporting all features of the HydraHarp 400, including the instrument's Time-Tagged Time-Resolved (TTTR) mode, where all photons or other events are captured as precisely timed individual records. This includes four external marker inputs.
These markers for synchronisation with other processes can be recorded as part of the TTTR mode data stream. This provides synchronisation with virtually all existing imaging devices including laser scanning microscopes (LSM). This allows the recording of fluorescence lifetime images with these systems at virtually any resolution and size.
The HydraHarp is a multichannel device based on a modular architecture. It uses a new time digitiser with one picosecond resolution and a processing rate of up to 12.5 million counts per second per channel. Through the programming library, users can exploit its unique new features, notably up to four identical input channels that can operate independently, but with a common crystal time base. Therefore, not only classical TCSPC histograms for the measurement of fluorescence decays, but also picosecond coincidence correlations can be obtained. The latter is of great interest in single molecule spectroscopy and general quantum physics.