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Design of a micrometer-long superconducting nanowire perfect absorber for efficient high-speed single-photon detection
Despite very efficient superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) reported recently, combining their other performance advantages such as high speed and ultralow timing jitter in a single device still remains challenging. In this work, we present a perfect absorber model and the corresponding detector design based on a micrometer-long NbN nanowire integrated with a 2D photonic crystal cavity of ultrasmall mode volume, which promises simultaneous achievement of near-unity absorption, gigahertz counting rates, and broadband optical response with a 3 dB bandwidth of 71 nm. Compared to previous stand-alone meandered and waveguide-integrated SNSPDs, this perfect absorber design addresses the trade space in size, efficiency, speed, and bandwidth for realizing large on-chip single-photon detector arrays.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1640959
- PAR ID:
- 10170943
- Publisher / Repository:
- Optical Society of America
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Photonics Research
- Volume:
- 8
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2327-9125
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 1260
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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