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IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity

Superconducting PNR Detector for Photon Sources Characterization

Pasquale Ercolano, Daniela Salvoni, Ciro Bruscino, Matteo Di Giancamillo, Chengjun Zhang, Mikkel Ejrnaes, Jia Huang, Hao Li, Lixing You, L. Parlato, Mario Martinelli, Giovanni Piero Pepe

Published Jan 15, 2024• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A superconducting photon number resolving detector can distinguish between different numbers of incoming photons. This makes it useful for many applications, such as boson sampling, quantum optics and communication. In particular, in this work we focused on the characterization of non-pulsed photon sources at the telecom wavelength 1550 nm by means of a superconducting device. We measured the response matrix of the detector and we reconstructed the Poissonian distribution of the number of photons emitted by a continuous wave laser light source.

DOI
10.1109/tasc.2024.3353709

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A superconducting photon number resolving detector can distinguish between different numbers of incoming photons. This makes it useful for many applications, such as boson sampling, quantum optics and communication. In particular, in this work we focused on the characterization of non-pulsed photon sources at the telecom wavelength 1550 nm by means of a superconducting device. We measured the response matrix of the detector and we reconstructed the Poissonian distribution of the number of photons emitted by a continuous wave laser light source.
Photon number resolving detectors find space in many fields, such as quantum optics, boson sampling and fluorescence spectroscopy. In particular, the reconstruction of the input photon distribution is essential in quantum communications to detect photon-number-splitting attacks. In this work, we discuss the operation configurations of a photon number resolving detector based on superconducting nanostrips at a wavelength of 1550 nm from a temporal point of view. We set a time binning and acquired the number of recorded pulses per bin by means of a time-to-digital converter. We studied the predictions of two theoretical models and compared them to the experimental data in order to analyse their operation regimes depending on the binwidth and to employ them for the reconstruction of the input photon distribution. We applied this method to a continuous-wave laser source, showing that the former can be used for the characterization of non-pulsed light sources, even with a photon emission rate so low that the dark count rate of a superconducting nanostrip is not negligible.
A photon number resolving detector (PNRD) is a device providing a different output depending on the number of incident photons in the single or few photons regime. This tool is crucial in several applications such as quantum communication, boson sampling, photon sources characterization and so on. PNRD are not new players in ultraviolet or visible wavelengths, but superconducting nanostrips provide a performing counterpart also in the near-infrared, where the aforementioned applications would like to operate. In this work we present a comprehensive description of the operation of an eight-pixel PNRD at the telecom wavelength of 1550 nm.
Photon-number resolving (PNR) single-photon detectors are of interest for a wide range of applications in the emerging field of photon-based quantum technologies. Especially photonic integrated circuits will pave the way for a high complexity and ease of use of quantum photonics. Superconducting nanowire singlephoton detectors (SNSPDs) are of special interest since they combine a high detection efficiency and a high timing accuracy with a high count rate and they can be configured as PNR-SNSPDs. Here, we present a PNR-SNSPD with a four photon resolution suitable for waveguide integration operating at a temperature of 4 K. A high statistical accuracy for the photon number is achieved for a Poissonian light source at a photon flux below 5 photons/pulse with a detection efficiency of 22.7 ± 3 % at 900 nm and a pulse rate frequency of 76 MHz. We demonstrate the ability of such a detector to discriminate a sub-Poissonian from a Poissonian light source.
Photon-number-resolving (PNR) single-photon detectors are an enabling technology in many areas, such as photonic quantum computing, nonclassical light-source characterization, and quantum imaging.Here, we demonstrate high-efficiency PNR detectors using a parallel superconducting nanowire singlephoton-detector (P-SNSPD) architecture that does not suffer from crosstalk between the pixels and that is free of latching.The behavior of the detector is modeled and used to predict the possible outcomes given a certain number of incoming photons.We apply our model to a four-pixel P-SNSPD with a system detection efficiency of 92.5%.We also demonstrate how this detector allows reconstructing the photonnumber statistics of a coherent source of light, which paves the way towards the characterization of the photon statistics of other types of light source using a single detector.