Recent progress in developing a Raman instrument for the rapid detection of Cryptosporidium in drinking water using wavelength-to-time conversion.

Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite that has gained much attention in the past 20 years as a clinically important human pathogen. Current Cryptosporidium monitoring methods involves steps that are time consuming, expensive and require highly trained experts. The talk will discuss about the experimental work that was performed towards the development of a highly multiplexed Raman instrument based on wavelength-to-time conversion for the rapid detection of Cryptosporidium in drinking water.
Wavelength-to-time conversion of the supercontinuum spectrum was performed with a multipixel single photon detector (SPAD) array using time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) technique. Such a technique is very useful in applications like Raman spectroscopy where we need to collect low intensity signals. A photonic lantern was used to route the light from each core of the multicore fibre (MCF) to an individual SPAD to perform the wavelength to time conversion. The future instrument design will also be discussed in the talk.