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Photon counting
Superconducting nanowires count single photons for quantum links and lidar.
The record behind photon counting
Nanowire detectors at 98 percent efficiency · NISTSuperconductors in photon counting
A nanowire held just below its critical current is a photon detector with almost no dark count, timing precision in the tens of picoseconds and efficiency close to unity at telecom wavelengths, and no semiconductor detector achieves all three at the same time. Quantum key distribution, deep-space optical links and single-photon lidar all run on them, and in each case the reach of the whole system is set by how few photons the receiver can work with.
What is stopping photon counting
Scale. One detector is routine and an array of thousands is not, because the nanowire’s yield depends on uniformity along its entire length and every channel has to be read out of a cryostat through a wire that is also a heat leak. Array count, not sensitivity, is the open problem.
What a better material would change for photon counting
The open problem is uniformity over area. A film that held its properties across a wafer rather than across a chip turns a handmade detector into an array, and an array is what turns single-photon sensing from an instrument into a component.
Conductors used in photon counting
Near photon counting, in compute and sensing
SuperMatics is a platform infrastructure company for superconducting devices: software that finds the material and the process, lab work that makes and measures it, and pilot manufacturing with industrial partners.If you are working on something in this field and a material is what stands in the way, tell us about it.