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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

High detection efficiency and rate superconducting nanowire single-photon detector with a composite optical structure

Min Gu, Lin Kang, Labao Zhang, Tao Jia, Chao Wan, Ruiying Xu, Xiaozhong Yang, Peiheng Wu

Published Mar 16, 2015• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) with a composite optical structure composed of phase-grating and optical cavity structures are designed to enhance system detection efficiency and count rates. Numerical simulation by finite-difference time-domain method shows that the photon absorption capacity of SNSPDs with a composite optical structure can be enhanced significantly by adjusting the parameters of the phase-grating and optical cavity structures. The absorption capacity of the superconducting nanowires reached 69.8% at the wavelength of 850 nm with 0.3 filling factor. When the filling factor was reduced to only 0.08, the absorption capacity is still 48.52%. It greatly decreased the kinetic inductance of SNSPDs, and improved the count rates.

DOI
10.1117/12.2078621

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Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) with a composite optical structure composed of phase-grating and optical cavity structures are designed to enhance system detection efficiency and count rates. Numerical simulation by finite-difference time-domain method shows that the photon absorption capacity of SNSPDs with a composite optical structure can be enhanced significantly by adjusting the parameters of the phase-grating and optical cavity structures. The absorption capacity of the superconducting nanowires reached 69.8% at the wavelength of 850 nm with 0.3 filling factor. When the filling factor was reduced to only 0.08, the absorption capacity is still 48.52%. It greatly decreased the kinetic inductance of SNSPDs, and improved the count rates.
Superconducting nanowire single photon detectors with an optical resonant cavity structure are fabricated directly on the single crystal substrate. In order to enhance the photons absorption of incident light and improve system detection efficiency (SDE) efficiently, the structure of SNSPD was designed and optimized using the finite-difference time-domain analysis for different kinds of substrates. The NbN-SNSPDs fabricated on different substrates are measured and compared. The SDE of NbN-SNSPD on MgO substrate reaches 66 % at the wavelength of 940nm at a dark count rate of 100 cps by illuminating from the back of the device through single mode optical fiber.
We present a numerical simulation of the optical absorptance for the superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs or SSPDs) designed with various layouts by using finite-element analysis software. The simulation results reveal that the electric field concentrated in the superconducting nanowire is enhanced by reducing the filling factor, and the degree of the enhancement becomes larger for thicker nanowires. Due to the large enhancement of the electric field in the nanowire with a double-side cavity structure, the high optical absorptance can be achieved even for the low-filling-factor layout by tuning the device design, which leads to the realization of SSPDs with high system detection efficiency and high counting rate.
We propose a superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) that can work efficiently at two target wavelengths and has a significant improvement in the counting rate due to the low-filling-factor nanowires in the silicon slots and the silver reflector. Numerical simulations show that the absorption efficiency can be over 90% at a single wavelength, whether the incident light wavelength is 1550 nm or 1064 nm, and over 80% when the SNSPD is designed to work at both wavelengths. In addition, the reset time is about 24% of the conventional SNSPDs. Our work presents a design for fabricating faster, larger-area, and multispectral SNSPDs with a high efficiency, which can be applied in applications such as quantum optics communication and multiwavelength sensing.
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This Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are efficient devices that absorb and convert incident photons to discriminable signals. However, the multi-spectral response of it is limited due to the resonance of the traditional optical cavity. In this work, we present a multi-spectral SNSPD that can detect single photon at multiple wavelengths with high efficiency simultaneously. The stack structure consists of nanowires embedded in the high refractive index dielectric strips, spacer layers and the reflection layer. The designed detector shows absorption efficiencies of over 85% at the three target wavelengths of 1550 nm, 1310 nm and 1064 nm while the filling factor of nanowire is only 20%. Meanwhile, the reset time is dramatically reduced by applying the low-filling-factor nanowire. Such ultrafast, high-performance single-photon detectors are promising for the rapidly advancing fields of multi-spectral imaging, satellite laser ranging and quantum communications.