Epitaxial niobium nitride superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors

Abstract

Superconducting nanowires used in single-photon detectors have been realized on amorphous or poly-crystalline films. Here, we report the use of single-crystalline NbN thin films for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs). Grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) at high temperature on nearly lattice-matched AlN-on-sapphire substrates, the NbN films exhibit high degree of uniformity and homogeneity. Even with relatively thick films, the fabricated nanowire detectors show saturated internal efficiency at near-IR wavelengths, demonstrating the potential of MBE-grown NbN for realizing large arrays of on-chip SNSPDs and their integration with AlN-based ${\chi }^{(2)}$ quantum photonic circuits.

References in corpus (10)

• On-Chip Detection of Entangled Photons by Scalable Integration of Single-Photon Detectors
• Aluminum nitride as a new material for chip-scale optomechanics and nonlinear optics
• Theory of single photon detection by 'dirty' current-carrying superconducting strip based on the kinetic equation approach
• Ultimate low system dark count rate for superconducting nanowire single-photon detector
• Large-area microwire MoSi single-photon detectors at 1550 nm wavelength
• Superconducting microwire detectors with single-photon sensitivity in the near-infrared
• Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors fabricated from atomic-layer-deposited NbN
• Proximity effect model of ultra-narrow NbN strips
• A single-photon detector with high efficiency and sub-10ps time resolution
• A platform for high performance photon correlation measurements

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Photon Conversion in Thin-film Lithium Niobate Nanowaveguides: A Noise Analysis
• Momentum-resolved electronic band structure and offsets in an epitaxial NbN/GaN superconductor/semiconductor heterojunction
• Heterogeneous integration of superconducting thin films and epitaxial semiconductor heterostructures with Lithium Niobate
• Site-Selective Enhancement of Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors via Local Helium Ion Irradiation
• Growth Optimization of MoSi Thin Film and Measurement of Transport Critical Current Density of its Meander Structure
• Ab initio modeling of nonequilibrium dynamics in superconducting detectors and qubits