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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Differential Architecture for Dark Count Reduction of Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors (SNSPDs)

Hyunseong Linus Kim, Andrew Mueller, Boris A. Korzh, Matthew D. Shaw

Published Apr 18, 2020• 0 citations
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We report the fabrication of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SSPD or SNSPD) with an ultralow dark count rate. By introducing optical band-pass filters at the input of the SSPD and cooling the filters at 3 K, the dark count rate is reduced to less than 1/100 at low bias. An SSPD with 0.1 cps dark count rate and 5.6% system detection efficiency at 1550 nm wavelength is obtained. We show that a quantum key distribution (QKD) over 300 km of fiber is possible based on a numerical calculation assuming a differential phase shift QKD protocol implemented with our SSPDs.
Superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) has been widely used in many fields such as quantum computing, quantum key distribution and laser radar, due to its high detection efficiency, low dark count rate, high counting rate, and low timing jitter. In most cases, the SNSPD works under the DC-bias mode that can detect single photons arrived at any time. In some cases such as satellite laser ranging and single-photon laser radar where the light pulses arrive regularly, the AC-bias mode enables the SNSPD to work with higher counting rates and lower background dark counts, which however requires complicated readout due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of the photon response. In this work, we report on an AC-biased SNSPD system with a self-differential readout circuit. The system includes a 2-pixel SNSPD consisting of two parallel nanowires, which are biased with 100 MHz sinusoidal current. The output signals of these two nanowires are amplified and combined for the differential readout of the photon response. The resulting response pulse possesses a signal-to-noise ratio ten times higher than that extracted before self-differential readout. In addition, the dark counts are reduced by a factor of 4, and the count rates are increased by a factor of 1.5, in comparison with those under the DC-bias mode. This work provides a specific method to read out the AC-biased SNSPD.
The dark count is one of the key physical issues for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) that limits various applications for optical quantum information and classical optics. When the bias current approaches the switching current of SNSPDs, the dark count is actually dominated by the intrinsic dark counts (iDCs). However, the origin of iDCs and its relation to constrictions remains unclear for practical SNSPDs. We herein systematically characterize the iDCs of the SNSPDs with and without artificial geometric constrictions by applying the differential readout method. For these devices with constrictions, we have observed distinct Gaussian distributions in the temporal distribution of iDCs, in which the time difference between the distributions is consistent with the geometric distance between constrictions, and the rates of iDCs produced by each constriction are in good agreement with constrictions' widths. With respect to practical SNSPDs, surprisingly, we also observe several Gaussian distributions in the temporal domain and it shows no significant dependence on the devices’ sizes, demonstrating that the iDCs of SNSPDs are mainly dominated by a few specific constrictions.