Gated Mode Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors

Abstract

Single Photon Detectors (SPD) are fundamental to quantum optics and quantum information. Superconducting Nanowire SPDs (SNSPD) [1] provide high performance in terms of quantum efficiency (QE), dark count rate (DCR) and timing jitter [2], but have limited maximum count rate (MCR) when operated as a free-running mode (FM) detector [3, 4]. However, high count rates are needed for many applications like quantum computing [5] and communication [6], and laser ranging [7]. Here we report the first operation of SNSPDs in a gated mode (GM) that exploits a single photon triggered latching phenomenon to detect photons. We demonstrate operation of a large active area single element GM-SNSPD at 625MHz, one order of magnitude faster than its FM counterpart. Contrary to FM-SNSPDs, the MCR in GM can be pushed to GHz range without a compromise on the active area or QE, while reducing the DCR.

References in corpus (2)

• Reset dynamics and latching in niobium superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors
• Nonlinearity in Single Photon Detection: Modeling and Quantum Tomography

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Waveguide Integrated Superconducting Single Photon Detectors Implemented as Coherent Perfect Absorbers
• Reduced Dark Counts in Optimized Geometries for Superconducting Nanowire Single photon Detectors
• Active Quenching of Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors
• Nanosecond gating of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors using cryogenic bias circuitry
• Synchronous single-photon detection with self-resetting GHz-gated superconducting NbN nanowires