Potential of a Superconducting Photon Counter for Heterodyne Detection at Telecommunication Wavelength

Abstract

Here, we report on successful operation of a NbN thin film superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) in a coherent mode (as a mixer) at the telecommunication wavelength of 1550 nm. Providing the Local Oscillator power of the order of a few picowatts, we were practically able to reach the quantum noise limited sensitivity. The intermediate frequency gain bandwidth was limited by the spectral band of single-photon response pulse of the detector, which is proportional to the detector size. We observed gain bandwidth of 65 MHz and 140 MHz for 7x7 um^2 and 3x3 um^2 devices respectively. Tiny amount of the required Local Oscillator power and wide gain and noise bandwidths along with the needless of any Low Noise Amplification opens possibility for a photon counting heterodyne-born megapixel array development.

The paper contains 10 pages, 4 figures, and is now under review for Optics Express

References in corpus (7)

• Quantum Computing
• Optical Quantum Computing
• Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors: physics and applications
• Quantum storage of entangled telecom-wavelength photons in an erbium-doped optical fibre
• Direct generation of three-photon polarization entanglement
• Singlet oxygen luminescence detection with a fiber-coupled superconducting nanowire single-photon detector
• A Near-Infrared 64-pixel Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detector Array with Integrated Multiplexed Readout

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Many-body cavity quantum electrodynamics with driven inhomogeneous emitters