Applied Optics

Improving the timing jitter of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detection system

Junjie Wu, Lixing You, Sijing Chen, Hao Li, Yuhao He, Chaolin Lv, Zhen Wang, Xiaoming Xie

Published Mar 6, 2017• 96 citations

Abstract

Low timing jitter is a unique merit of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) for time-correlated applications. Quantitative analysis was performed for the SNSPD system. Aided by an oscilloscope with an optimal signal amplitude, we were able to measure a full width at half-maximum system timing jitter as low as 14.2 ps for a high-switching-current SNSPD using a room-temperature low-noise amplifier. When using a time-correlated single-photon counting module, the system timing jitter was 17.3 ps. The detector's intrinsic timing jitter was estimated at ∼12.0 ps.

DOI: 10.1364/ao.56.002195

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