Constriction-limited detection efficiency of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors

By A. Kerman, E. Dauler, Joel K. W. Yang, K. Rosfjord, V. Anant, K. Berggren, G. Goltsman, B. Voronov. 2006

223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the source of the large variations in the observed detection efficiencies of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors between many nominally identical devices. Through both electrical and optical measurements, we infer that these variations arise from “constrictions:” highly localized regions of the nanowires where the effective cross-sectional area for superconducting current is reduced. These constrictions limit the bias-current density to well below its critical value over the remainder of the wire, and thus prevent the detection efficiency from reaching the high values that occur in these devices when they are biased near the critical current density.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/226726051a1f1dfb6d053753e2e3e81356872982

Citations in the corpus

• Single-photon detectors for optical quantum information applications (2009, unknown): “Fabrication of large-area detectors is challenging because the wire must be completely uniform along its length — a constriction at any point in the wire will negate the sensitivity of the rest of the detector 84 .”