A high speed and high efficiency superconducting photon number resolving detector

Abstract

A series superconducting nanowire single-photon detector is a high performance nanowire array detector that has the potential to reach a high system detection efficiency (SQE), a high counting rate (CR) and photon number resolving functionality. Interconnected with a simplified readout, it shows promise for large scale expansion and has good prospects for future applications in single-photon imaging, quantum optics, quantum computing and deep-space communication. In this paper, we demonstrate a high SQE and CR series superconducting nanowire single-photon detector with an active area of 20 × 20 μm2. The detector shows a maximum SQE of 68% at 1550 nm with a dark count rate of 200 Hz and a wide response wavelength from 1100–2000 nm. It also achieves a CR over 300 MHz at single photon power level and has the capability of resolving photon numbers by up to six photons.

Characterize the Speed of a Photon-Number-Resolving Superconducting Nanowire Detector

“…Recently, we fabricated a large area (∼20 × 20 μm 2 ) SND with a total kinetic inductance of 1.25 μH, which had a pulse recovery time of ∼50 ns, but the PNR detector demonstrated a potential of high counting rate [14]. In this work, we found that the increase of counting rates was attributed to the series array architecture and the weak dependence of detection efficiency on bias current.…”

Mid-infrared photon counting with superconducting nanowires

“…Although SNSPDs were initially incapable of distinguishing between single and multi-photon events much progress has been made in recent years. Various schemes exist including exploiting the rise time variation between different n-photon events [49] or connecting multiple nanowires in series [50,51].…”

Quantum detector tomography of a 2×2 multi-pixel array of superconducting nanowire single photon detectors

“…Although recent work has shown that some photon number resolution can be recovered directly from the output of the detector by modifying the bias circuitry [7][8][9][10], in standard operation, however, these detectors do not resolve the number of photons incident. To overcome this, SNSPDs can be multiplexed in arrays, either spatial [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] or temporal [25][26][27], such that the number of pixels in the array that fire gives some information about the number of photons that were incident.…”

“…Due to their low noise, high timing resolution and excellent efficiency across a broad wavelength range, superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs) have become increasingly prevalent in low-photon-flux optical sensing [1][2][3][4][5]. Advances in fabrication yield and read-out techniques [6][7][8][9][10][11][12] have enabled arrays of such detectors to be developed [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24], which have lead to applications in imaging [20,25,26] and deep space communication [27]. Such devices are also ideal for multiplexed photon counting in quantum optics experiments.…”