Photosensor Device Based on a 16-Electrode Position-Sensitive Detector with High Temporal Resolution

—We report the development of a photosensor device based on a position-sensitive detector with a gallium arsenide (GaAs) cathode and a 16-element anode. In the case of asymmetric heterostatic circuit (electrodes combined in fours) its working field was limited by 10 mm (for a 18-mm photocathode). Implementing a scheme of analog coding of the coordinates of the centroids of electron avalanches arriving to the anode in the photosensor device made it possible to increase the field size to 14 mm and achieve a spatial resolution of 50 μm. The resulting photosensor device is used as the principal component of a multimode field photopolarimeter in observations with a microsecond time resolution on the 6-m telescope of the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We report some of the results obtained in the process of this work.