Because of low power consumption and small footprint, avalanche photodiodes (APD) have been commonly applied to photon detection. Recently, high speed quantum communication has been demonstrated for high bit-rate quantum key distribution. For the high speed quantum communication, photon detectors should operate at GHz-clock frequencies. We propose balanced detection circuits for GHz-clock operation of InGaAs-APD photon detectors. The balanced single photon detector operates with sinusoidal wave gating. The sinusoidal wave appearing in the output is removed by the subtraction from APD signal without sharp band-elimination filters. Omission of the sharp filters removes the constraint on the operating frequency of the single photon detector. We present two designs, one works with two identical APDs, the other with one APD and a low-pass filter. The sinusoidal gating enables to eliminate the gating noise even with the simple configuration of the latter design. We demonstrated the balanced single photon detector operating with 1.020GHz clock at 233 K, 193 K, and 186.5 K. The dark count probability was 4.0 x 10-4 counts/pulse with the quantum efficiency of 10% at 233K, and 1.6 x 10-4 counts/pulse at 186.5 K. These results were obtained with easily available APDs (NR8300FP-C.C, RENESASS) originally developed for optical time-domain reflectmeters.
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