Photek Licenses Arradiance Nanofilm Technology Portfolio to Manufacture Next Generation Photodetectors

Market acceptance of Arradiance’s breakthrough nanofilm technology continues to grow following stellar technical results from the High Energy Physics community

Photek, Ltd. of St Leonards on Sea, UK today announced that it is licensing the intellectual property of Arradiance, Inc. of Sudbury, MA for use in nanofilm microchannel plate (MCP) based imagers and detectors. Arradiance’s revolutionary nanofilm technology, covered by 11 issued US patents and several pending US and worldwide patents, has been demonstrated to be the foundational technology for the next generation photomultiplier tubes (PMT) at several high energy physics installations worldwide.

“Phototubes made using Arradiance’s nanofilm technology demonstrate an order of magnitude improvement in MCP-PMT lifetime, enabling the unsurpassed timing resolution of these devices to be used in applications which have not been open to traditional MCP-based imagers and detectors,” said Gareth Jones, MD of Photek.

"Arradiance has invested millions of dollars and years of research in the development of this nanofilm technology. We are witnessing a broad acceptance across the industry as evidenced by partners such as Photek, and Argonne National Laboratory/University of Chicago’s Large Area Picosecond Photo-Detector (LAPPD) project,” explains Ken Stenton, Arradiance CEO, “It is gratifying to see this technology begin to roll out in Photek’s outstanding products.”

Arradiance nanofilms are made possible by their proprietary recipes and unique benchtop GEMStar™ Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) system. GEMStar employs an innovative hot-wall reactor and precursor delivery system to deposit highly uniform and repeatable films in high aspect ratio, high surface area substrates.