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David M. Rutter (Fed)

David Rutter is an Electronics Technician in the Alternative Computing Group in the Nanoscale Device Characterization Division of the Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML). He has an Associate degree in Electronic & Computer Technology from Electronic Institutes, Middletown, PA. David has over 21 years of experience working with power and precision instrumentation, and has held positions in government and private industry as an electronics technician, signal support system specialist, and engineering technician. His prior places of employment include Spirent Communications and Techkor Instrumentation. Since joining NIST in 2005, David has constructed numerous electronic instruments for controlling state-of-the-art scientific experiments, notably including custom electronic devices for complex scanning tunneling microscopes.

Patents (2018-Present)

A line drawing of the protector for photon detector

Protector for Photon Detector

NIST Inventors
David M. Rutter
This invention describes a device and method to help protect a given avalanche photo diode (APD) from excessive light or photon counts without modification to the APD itself or the associated power for the APD. High photon count rate to a reference frequency and rapidly shutting down the APD if a
Created October 9, 2019, Updated December 8, 2022