Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors
We are fabricating and testing single infrared/optical photon detectors based on
a current-biased superconducting niobium (Nb) nanowire. The detectors
are fabricated from high quality Nb thin films on a
sapphire substrate. We are investigating both the fundamental physics
of the detection mechanism as well as the operating performance of
practical detectors.
These nanowire-based detectors provide a window into strongly out of
equilibrium superconducting 1D and quasi-1D systems. Such systems have displayed
a variety of interesting phenomena (e.g. thermal and quantum fluctuations and
phase slips, quantum phase transitions) and have been the subject of much recent
investigation. Practically, these detectors provide single photon counting resolution
with hundreds of MHz counting rates, tens of picoseconds of jitter, and
negligible dark counts. This makes them useful in a variety of
applications, including imaging of IR photoemission in CMOS circuitry,
quantum and classical communication, lidar, and optical spectroscopy
of single molecule florescence. This work is in collaboration with
Prof. A. Frydman (Bar-Ilan) and Dr. M. Rooks (IBM),
and is supported by NSF-EPDT, NSF-GRFP and IBM Research.
For more information, see the paper "Niobium superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors,"
A.J. Annunziata, D.F. Santavicca, J.D. Chudow, L. Frunzio, M.J. Rooks, A. Frydman
and D.E. Prober, IEEE Trans. Appl. Supercond. 19(3), 327-331 (2009).
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