HydraHarp 500

HydraHarp 500 is fully compatible with UniHarp, PicoQuant’s modern and intuitive graphical user interface for TCSPC and time tagging. UniHarp provides seamless access to advanced measurement modes such as time trace, histogram, raw data, unfold, and correlation analysis including FCS and g², enabling efficient data acquisition and real-time experiment monitoring.

For users who require programmatic control, HydraHarp 500 supports snAPI, a high-performance Python interface built on a robust C++ core. snAPI enables fast device configuration, real-time data access, and direct handling of unfolded data or PTU files, allowing researchers to implement custom algorithms and automated analysis pipelines.

For maximum flexibility, the HydraHarp 500 offers a comprehensive programming library supporting C, C#, LabVIEW, Matlab, and Python. This enables full integration into custom experimental environments and synchronized measurement systems. Provided demo code and well-documented functions ensure a fast and straightforward start for advanced users.

PicoQuant‘s revolutionary TTTR mode records every detected photon as an individual time-tag event without early data reduction, preserving the full timing information of the experiment. This enables advanced analyses such as photon burst detection, detailed fluorescence dynamics, FCS, g² correlation and high speed FLIM with unlimited image size. TTTR is also widely used in single molecule spectroscopy, time interval analysis and quantum optics. A dedicated blog article will provide a deeper introduction to TTTR, its modes and its application range.

In order to support the widest possible variety of single photon detectors, the PicoHarp 330 provides different input circuitry. For optimal timing with e.g. Single-Photon Avanlanche Diodes (SPADs) the inputs can be configured as level triggers while for best performance with Hybrid Photodetectors (HPD), Photomultiplier Tubes (PMTs), Micro Channel Plates (MCPs) or Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors (SNSPDs) at high count rates they can be configured as Constant Fraction Discriminators (CFD). This way the overall system IRF may be tuned to become narrower. The same could not be achieved with a simple level trigger (comparator). Particularly with PMTs and MCPs, constant fraction discrimination is very important as their pulse amplitudes vary significantly.

Conti-Mode is PicoQuant’s hardware-based continuous histogramming workflow for high-speed, uninterrupted acquisition of time-resolved data. Instead of capturing a single histogram at a time, the instrument generates consecutive, gapless histogram blocks automatically, each combining precise timing metadata with full histogram content and channel sums. This makes Conti-Mode ideal for real-time monitoring, long measurement series, process control, and applications such as fluorescence lifetime flow cytometry where continuous streaming and instant evaluation of histogram data are essential.”