Counting near-infrared single-photons with 95% efficiency.

By A. Lita, Aaron J. Miller, Sae Woo Nam. Optics Express, 2008

681 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Single-photon detectors operating at visible and near-infrared wavelengths with high detection efficiency and low noise are a requirement for many quantum-information applications. Superconducting transition-edge sensors (TESs) are capable of detecting visible and near-infrared light at the single-photon level and are capable of discriminating between one- and two-photon absorption events; however these capabilities place stringent design requirements on the TES heat capacity, thermometry, and optical detection efficiency. We describe the fabrication and evaluation of a fiber-coupled, photon-number-resolving TES detector optimized for absorption at 1550 and 1310 nm wavelengths. The measured system detection efficiency at 1556 nm is 95 % +/- 2 %, which to our knowledge is the highest system detection efficiency reported for a near-infrared single-photon detector.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de05e6f4ae9c23d44af19d28835440043d967f08

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Citations in the corpus

Quantum computational advantage with a programmable photonic processor (2022, methodology): “Spatial overlap is ensured by using single-mode fibre coupling at the entrance and exit of each loop delay, and samples are collected using an array of photon-number resolving (PNR) detectors based on superconducting transition-edge sensors (TES) with 95% detection efficiency 39,40 .”
Conceptual design of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO) (2014, background): “Within these limitations TES-based sensors are capable of counting single photons down to the sub-eV energy range [78, 79, 80].”
Practical challenges in quantum key distribution (2016, neutral): “…detection technologies such as superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), 24 superconducting transition-edge sensors (TES), 25 frequency up-conversion single photon dete-ctors, 26,27 and self-differencing InGaAs avalanche photodiodes, 28 as well as of high-performance…”
Quantum random number generators (2016, methodology): “Most optical detectors have a low efficiency, but transition-edge-sensor detectors (Lita et al., 2008) have been shown to offer a high enough efficiency to close the detection loophole in some modified versions of Bell’s inequality (Giustina et al., 2013) and have been used to generate certified…”
Blueprint for a Scalable Photonic Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computer (2020, background): “Recent advances in photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors [36–39] have substantially improved the viability of the post-selection approach in the near term, with methods based on Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) [27–30] now within reach of state-of-the-art optical devices.”
Any Light Particle Search II -- Technical Design Report (2013, methodology): “This enables them to reach high sensitivity [84] and achieve highest quantum efficiencies [85].”
Quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optics (2009, background): “(Lita et al., 2008) has recently reported photon-number resolving detectors with 95% efficiency at the optimal wavelength for telecom fibers (1556 nm), with a temporal response time of about 1 µs.”
Directional detection of dark matter with two-dimensional targets (2016, background): “We expect to be able to achieve ∼ 1 eV energy resolution by scaling up existing measurements for single-IR photon counting [48], which has demonstrated resolutions of 0.”