An optical transition-edge sensor with high energy resolution

Abstract

Optical transition-edge sensors have shown energy resolution for resolving the number of incident photons at the telecommunication wavelength. Higher energy resolution is required for biological imaging and microscope spectroscopy. In this paper, we report on a Au/Ti (10/20 nm) bilayer TES that showed high energy resolution. This was achieved by lowering the critical temperature Tc to 115 mK and the resultant energy resolution was 67 meV full width at half maximum (FWHM) at 0.8 eV. When Tc was lowered to 115 mK, the theoretical resolution would scaled up to 30 meV FWHM, considering that the typical energy resolution of optical TESs is 150 meV and Tc is 300 mK. To investigate the gap between the theoretical expectation (30 meV) and the measured value (67 meV), we measured its complex impedance and current noise. We found excess Johnson noise in the TES and an excess Johnson term M was 1.5 at a bias point where the resistance was 10% of normal resistance. For reference, the TES was compared with a TES showing typical energy resolution (156 meV FWHM). We will discuss what improved the energy resolution and what might have been the limiting factor on it.

References in corpus (2)

• Complex impedance, responsivity and noise of transition-edge sensors: analytical solutions for two- and three-block thermal models
• Voltage Fluctuations in ac Biased Superconducting Transition-Edge Sensors

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• Nanoscale Architecture for Frequency-Resolving Single-Photon Detectors
• Sensitivity of Transition-Edge Sensors to Strong DC Electric Fields
• On the Applicability Ranges of Tc Formulas for Proximity-Coupled Thin SN and SS Bilayers
• High-Rate Four Photon Subtraction from Squeezed Vacuum: Preparing Cat State for Optical Quantum Computation
• First direct search for light dark matter interactions in a transition-edge sensor
• Binary Classification of Light and Dark Time Traces of a Transition Edge Sensor Using Convolutional Neural Networks