How well can superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors resolve photon number?

Abstract

We apply principal component analysis (PCA) to a set of electrical output signals from a commercially available superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) to investigate their photon-number-resolving capability. We find that the rising edge as well as the amplitude of the electrical signal have the most dependence on photon number. Accurately measuring the rising edge while simultaneously measuring the voltage of the pulse amplitude maximizes the photon-number resolution of SNSPDs. Using an optimal basis of principle components, we show unambiguous discrimination between one- and two-photon events, as well as partial resolution up to five photons. This expands the use-case of SNSPDs to photon-counting experiments, without the need of detector multiplexing architectures.

7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Photon number resolution using a time-multiplexed single-photon detector
• GHz detection rates and dynamic photon-number resolution with superconducting nanowire arrays
• High-efficiency and fast photon-number resolving parallel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector

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• Optically-Sampled Superconducting-Nanostrip Photon-Number Resolving Detector for Non-Classical Quantum State Generation
• Jitter in photon-number-resolved detection by superconducting nanowires
• Accurate Unsupervised Photon Counting from Transition Edge Sensor Signals
• Linear-optical protocols for mitigating and suppressing noise in bosonic systems
• Practical considerations for assignment of photon numbers with SNSPDs