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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Increased detection efficiencies of nanowire single-photon detectors by integration of an optical cavity and anti-reflection coating

Kristine M. Rosfjord, Joel K. W. Yang, Eric A. Dauler, Vikas Anant, Karl K. Berggren, Andrew J. Kerman, Boris M. Voronov, Gregory N Gol'tsman

Published Jan 1, 2006• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We fabricate and test superconducting NbN-nanowire single-photon detectors with an integrated optical cavity and anti-reflection coating. We design the cavity and coating such as to maximize absorption in the NbN film of the detector.
DOI
10.1109/cleo.2006.4628700

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Optical cavity with backside optical coupling is one of the prevalent optical structures for superconducting nanowire single photon detector. A single layer anti-reflection coating (ARC) on the backside of the substrate is often adopted to enhance the transmittance to the substrate. We here apply a multilayer ARC to further increase the transmittance from 94.5% to 99.5%. An NbTiN SNSPD made on such a substrate with cavity structure presents a system detection efficiency of 90.1% at a dark count rate (DCR) of 100 Hz, which is the best value reported for backside optical coupled SNSPD at 1550 nm. It shows a timing jitter of ∼40.7 ps and the recovery time constant of ∼22.9 ns.