Development of superconducting nanowire single-photon detector on waveguide I

Kentaro Waki

Wolfram H. P. Pernice, Carsten Schuck, Hong X. Tang

Marco Colangelo, Boris Desiatov, Di Zhu +4 more

We integrate niobium nitride superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) on thin-film lithium niobate (LN) photonic waveguides. Further development of this technology may push towards more complex circuits and functionalities on this already promising platform.

Kentaro Waki, Taro Yamashita, Shin‐ichiro Inoue +5 more

Xintong Hou, Xiao-Yun Xu, Guangzhao Xu +7 more

The implementation of quantum information technologies requires the development of integrated quantum chips. Femtosecond laser direct writing (FLDW) waveguides and superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have been widely applied in integrated quantum photonic circuits. In this work, a novel FLDW waveguide-coupled SNSPD was designed and realized by integrating FLDW waveguides and conventional SNSPDs together. Through a COMSOL simulation, a waveguide end face-nanowire optical coupling structure was designed and verified. The simulation results showed that the FLDW waveguide-coupled SNSPD device, which had a target wavelength of 780 nm, can achieve 87% optical absorption. Then the preparation process of the FLDW waveguide-coupled SNSPD device was developed, and the fabricated device achieved a system detection efficiency of 1.7% at 10 Hz dark count rate. Overall, this method provides a feasible single-photon detector solution for future on-chip integrated quantum photonic experiments and applications.

Lixing You, Junjie Wu, Yingxin Xu +9 more

High-performance superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have facilitated numerous experiments and applications, particularly in the fields of modern quantum optics and quantum communication. Two kinds of optical coupling methods have thus far been developed for SNSPDs: one produces standard fiber-coupled SNSPDs in which the fibers vertically illuminate the meandered nanowires; the other produces waveguide-coupled SNSPDs in which nanowires are fabricated on the surface of a waveguide that guides photons, and the fibers are coupled to the waveguide. In this paper, we report on first experimental demonstration of a new type of SNSPD that is coupled with a microfiber (MF). Photons are guided by the MF and are evanescently absorbed by the nanowires of the SNSPD when the MF is placed on top of superconducting NbN nanowires. Room-temperature optical experiments indicated that this device has a coupling efficiency of up to 90% when a 1.3 μm-diameter MF is used for light with wavelength of 1550 nm. We were also able to demonstrate that our MF-coupled detector achieved system detection efficiencies of 50% and 20% at incident wavelengths of 1064 and 1550 nm, respectively, for a 2 μm-diameter MF at 2.2K. We expect that MF-coupled SNSPDs may show both high efficiency and broadband characteristics upon optimization and will be used for various novel applications, such as micro/nano-fiber optics.