Abstract
Superconducting nanowires have emerged as one of the most promising systems for detecting a single photon, offering high speed and wide optical range (UV to mid-IR) along with very low dark count rates. A Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detector (SNSPD) is an ultra-thin, ultra-narrow superconducting wire that is current biased just below its critical current density. When one photon is absorbed, a hot spot is formed, causing the superconducting wire to develop a resistance and consequently deliver an output voltage pulse. In this talk, I will describe our work packaging and characterizing SNSPDs, including steps taken to minimize timing jitter in real-world measurements. I will discuss our latest efforts at fabricating SNSPDs with WSi (as opposed to the more traditional NbN) which has yielded detectors with higher efficiency and larger active area. I will also discuss a detector with four superconducting nanowires interleaved over a single spatial mode. With this four-element device, we can measure high-order optical coherences, and demonstrate some unusual properties of high-order photon bunching and antibunching. These measurements offer new insight into the distinctions between incoherent light, which is most of the light we experience in the world; the highly coherent light produced by lasers; and light produced one photon at a time from a single quantum emitter.
Speaker
Martin Stevens, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
Martin Stevens received a B.S. in Physics from the University of Minnesota in 1996 and a Ph. D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Iowa in 2004. He then joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology as a National Research Council postdoctoral fellow, where he become a staff scientist in 2007. Dr. Stevens is a member of the Quantum Electronics and Photonics Division at NIST. His research there has focused on the development, characterization and implementation of single-photon sources and detectors.
When and where
The open talk takes place on Wednesday, March 28, 2012, starting at 9.30 am and ending at approx. 10.30 am.
It will be held at the facilities of PicoQuant GmbH, Kekuléstraße 7, 2nd floor, 12489 Berlin-Adlershof.
Local area map:
Registration
The registration is closed.
Information and correspondence
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