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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

WSi superconducting nanowire single photon detector with a temporal resolution below 5 ps

Boris A. Korzh, Qingyuan Zhao, Simone Frasca, Di Zhu, Edward Ramirez, Eric A. Bersin, Marco Colangelo, Andrew E. Dane, Andrew D. Beyer, Jason P. Allmaras, Emma E. Wollman, Karl K. Berggren, Matthew D. Shaw

Published Jan 1, 2018• 14 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Through the use of an impedance matched taper, be we demonstrate a reduction of the noise jitter in WSi SNSPDs to a level below the intrinsic effects, resulting in full-width at half-maximum values of 4.8 ps for 532 nm and 10.3 ps for 1550 nm single photons.
DOI
10.1364/cleo_qels.2018.fw3f.3

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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.
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We investigate the operation of WSi superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) at 2.5 K, a temperature which is ∼70% of the superconducting transition temperature (TC) of 3.4 K. We demonstrate saturation of the system detection efficiency at 78 ± 2% at a wavelength of 1310 nm, with a jitter of 191 ps. We find that the jitter at 2.5 K is limited by the noise of the readout and can be improved through the use of cryogenic amplifiers. Operation of SNSPDs with high efficiency at temperatures very close to TC appears to be a unique property of amorphous WSi.
We investigate the operation of WSi superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) at 2.5 K, a temperature which is ∼70% of the superconducting transition temperature (TC) of 3.4 K. We demonstrate saturation of the system detection efficiency at 78 ± 2% at a wavelength of 1310 nm, with a jitter of 191 ps. We find that the jitter at 2.5 K is limited by the noise of the readout and can be improved through the use of cryogenic amplifiers. Operation of SNSPDs with high efficiency at temperatures very close to TC appears to be a unique property of amorphous WSi.
Conventional readout of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) sets an upper bound on the output voltage to be the product of the bias current and the load impedance, IB×Zload, where Zload is limited to 50Ω in standard RF electronics. This limit is broken/exceeded by interfacing the 50Ω load and the SNSPD using an integrated superconducting transmission line taper. The taper is a transformer that effectively loads the SNSPD with high impedance without latching. The taper increases the amplitude of the detector output while preserving the fast rising edge. Using a taper with a starting width of 500 nm, a 3.6× higher pulse amplitude, 3.7× faster slew rate, and 25.1 ps smaller timing jitter was observed. The taper also makes the detector's output voltage sensitive to the number of photon-induced hotspots and enables photon number resolution.
Simulations are run to optimize the ability to resolve the number of photons detected from the pulse height by a Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detector (SNSPD). This is set up in a manner that features an impedance-matching transmission line taper that provides a characteristic impedance which transitions from kΩ to 50 Ω, with the taper providing an effective load impedance that outputs pulses with not only larger amplitudes but also showed a distinct separation for multi-photon events. The first part of this project tries to computationally match the experimental results obtained by our collaborators at MIT. Once these results are achieved, we try to modify the device geometry to improve the key detector metrics which include timing jitter, dark count rate, reset time, and overall detection efficiency.