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Frontiers in Optics

Photon Counting with an Adaptive Storage Loop

Boris Braverman, Nicholas M. Sullivan, Robert W. Boyd

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Single-photon detectors can be used to resolve photon number by storing the photons in a delay loop. We consider a loop with adaptive, detection-record dependent out-coupling, finding that the dynamic range and effective speed of the detector can be enhanced compared to a purely passive setup.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2023.fth3b.3

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We propose a design for a photon-counting detector that is capable of resolving multiphoton events. The basic element of the setup is a fiber loop, which traps the input field with the help of a fast electro-optic switch. A single weakly coupled avalanche photodiode is used to detect small portions of the signal field extracted from the loop. We analyze the response of the loop detector to an arbitrary input field and discuss both the reconstruction of the photon-number distribution of an unknown field from the count statistics measured in the setup and the application of the detector in conditional-state preparation.
We discuss the difficulties of photon-counting at extremely high rates and introduce a scheme for a photon-counting detection system that addresses these difficulties. The method uses an array of N detectors and a 1-by-N optical switch with a control circuit to direct input light to live detectors. We compare performance of our system to other, passive detection systems and show that our detection system can handle incident photon rates higher than otherwise possible by suppressing the effects of detector deadtime. To support this claim, we present results of theoretical analysis and a proof-of- concept experiment. In particular, both calculations and the experiment prove that a group of intelligently managed N detectors provides an improvement in operation rate that can exceed the improvement that would be obtained by either a single detector with deadtime reduced by 1/N, even if it were feasible to produce a single detector with such a large improvement in deadtime, or a passive beamsplitter tree system with N detectors. In addition to deadtime reduction, our scheme reduces afterpulsing as well as background counts (such as dark counts). We conclude that an intelligent active management of a group of N detectors is the best arrangement of photon-counting detectors to handle high photon rates, an important technological challenge for fast developing quantum metrology and quantum key distribution applications.
The conventional optical detectors operate in a linear mode, but their sensitivity is limited due to the noise in the readout electronics. Single photon detectors, on the other hand, have the highest sensitivity, but are strongly nonlinear. Photon number resolving detectors, which can precisely determine the number of photons in weak optical pulses, are potential candidates to fill the gap between these two detection modes. We present the design of photon number resolving detectors with large dynamic range, based on spatial multiplexing of superconducting single photon detectors, with excellent timing resolution and very high sensitivity at the telecommunication wavelength range.
Superconducting series nanowire single-photon detectors (SNDs) have been used for resolving photon numbers. But it can also exhibit a higher counting rate than a single superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD), because the serial architecture allows multiple detectors working in parallel and the inductance of each pixel is reduced. In this paper, we found each pixel of the SND could reset fast although the whole detector took a much longer time for recovering. Therefore, the speed of an SND with a large kinetic inductance of 1.25 μH was characterized and compared to a standard SNSPD with the same total inductance. By measuring the detected photon rate over the input photon rate, we obtained a photon counting rate enhancement by 7.5 times. Meanwhile, the timing jitter of the SND was 63 ps at single photon detection regime. Our results show that the series structure and the readout scheme are quite practical in realizing high speed single-photon detectors besides resolving photon numbers.