Paper Optics group highlighted as Editor's Pick in Applied Optics Magazine

News - 11 December 2019 - Communication ImPhys

The paper "Multimode Fiber Coupled Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors with High Detection Efficiency and Time Resolution" of the ImPhys Optics group has been chosen as Editor's Pick of the Applied Optics magazine. 

"Multimode-fiber-coupled superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors with high detection efficiency and time resolution"

Jin Chang, Iman Esmaeil Zadeh, Johannes W. N. Los, Julien Zichi, Andreas Fognini, Monique Gevers, Sander Dorenbos, Silvania F. Pereira, Paul Urbach, and Val Zwiller 

In the past decade, superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have gradually become an indispensable part of any demanding quantumoptics experiment. Until now,most SNSPDs have been coupled to single-modefibers. SNSPDs coupled to multi mode fibers have shown promising efficiencies but have yet to achieve high time resolution. For a number of applications ranging from quantum nano-photonics to bio-optics, high efficiency and high time resolution are desired at the same time. Int his paper,we demonstrate the role of polarization on the efficiency of multimode-fiber-coupled detectors and fabricated high-performance 20µm,25µm,and 50 µm diameter detectors targeted for visible, near-infrared, and telecom wavelengths. A custom-built setup was used to simulate realistic experiments with randomized modes in the fiber. We achieved over 80% system efficiency and <20 ps timing jitter for 20 µm SNSPDs. Also,we realized 70% system efficiency and <20 ps timing jitter for 50 µm SNSPDs. The high-efficiency multimode-fiber-coupled SNSPDs with unparalleled time resolution will benefit various quantum optics experiments and applications in the future.