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Quantum 2.0 Conference and Exhibition

Implementation of Cryogenic Amplifier by Using Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detector

Behnoosh Babaghorbani, Iman Esmaeil Zadeh

Published Jan 1, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Measuring superconducting materials near absolute zero Kelvin poses challenges due to low output voltage. This study presents a cryogenic amplifier for ultra-low temperatures, fabricable on the same chip as the material, replacing noisy room temperature setups.
DOI
10.1364/quantum.2024.qw3a.13

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Scalable, low power, high speed data transfer between cryogenic and room temperature environments is essential for the realization of practical, large-scale systems based on superconducting technologies. Optical fiber presents a 100–1,000x lower heat load than conventional electrical wiring, relaxing the requirements for thermal anchoring, and allows for very high bandwidth densities by carrying multiple signals through the same physical fiber. By operating a CMOS modulator in the forward bias regime at a temperature of 3.6 K, we have demonstrated the optical readout of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) without the need for an interfacing device.
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We designed, fabricated, and tested a one-dimensional array of superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors, integrated with on-chip inductors and resistors. The architecture is suitable for monolithic integration on a single chip operated in a cryogenic environment, and inherits the characteristics of individual superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors. We demonstrated a working array with four pixels showing position discrimination and a timing jitter of 124 ps. The electronic crosstalk between the pixels in the array was negligible.
Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPD) have the advantages of high maximal counting rate (MCR), high detection efficiency, and low dark count rate. They play an important role in the fields of optical quantum communication, optical quantum computing, laser ranging, and imaging. The MCR (i.e. detection speed) of SNSPD can be affected by the front-end readout circuit. To increase MCR, it is usually necessary to use a cryogenic DC-coupled readout circuit with a broad bandwidth. This study reports an SNSPD cryogenic DC-coupled amplification readout circuit based on a commercial high-speed operational amplifier chip OPA855. We systematically characterize its performance parameters in a temperature range from a room temperature of 300 K to a low temperature of 4.2 K. We address the problem of bandwidth loss of the circuit in a low-temperature environment by increasing the operating voltage of the OPA855 chip. For example, at 40 K, the operating voltage increases from ±2.5 V to ±4.9 V, and the quiescent current is about 8 mA, which is equivalent to a power consumption of 78 mW; meanwhile, the gain of this readout circuit is 16.7 dB, and the –3 dB cutoff bandwidth is ~2.7 GHz. We further install a cryogenic DC-coupled readout circuit based on the OPA855 amplifier at 40 K and characterize the performance parameters of the SNSPD at 2.2 K, such as the switching current, system detection efficiency, and MCR. The comparison with the conventional AC-coupled readout circuit at room temperature shows that the MCR increases about 1.3 times after using the DC-coupling circuit. Our study provides the interesting information about the OPA855 amplifier’s performance at low temperatures which facilitates its application in cryogenic environments and related fields.
We have developed a practical superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) system with our superconducting thin films and devices fabrication, optical coupling packaging, and cryogenic technology. The SNSPD devices were fabricated from high-quality niobium nitride (NbN) ultra-thin films that were epitaxially grown on single-crystal MgO substrates, and optical cavity structure were applied for improvement of photo absorption efficiency. The SNSPD system was developed based on a compact Gifford-McMahon (GM) cryocooler, in which SNSPD can operate continuously at temperature of 2.9 K +/- 10 mK with low power consumption without any liquid cryogens. The system detection efficiencies at 1550 nm wavelength (at a 100 Hz dark count rate) were found to be 2.6% for device without optical cavity and 21% for device with optical cavity. The response speed of devices showed maximally 200 MHz with 5 × 5 mm square device, and timing jitter of 100 ps full width at a half maximum (FWHM) was observed.