Impact of polar-azimuthal illumination angles on efficiency of nano-cavity-array integrated single-photon detectors

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors integrated with optical nano-antennae.

Optical nano-antennae have been integrated with semiconductor lasers to intensify light at the nanoscale and photodiodes to enhance photocurrent. In quantum optics, plasmonic metal structures have been used to enhance nonclassical light emission from single quantum dots. Absorption and detection of single photons from free space could also be enhanced by nanometallic antennae, but this has not ...

Numerical method to optimize the polar-azimuthal orientation of infrared superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors.

A finite-element method for calculating the illumination-dependence of absorption in three-dimensional nanostructures is presented based on the radio frequency module of the Comsol Multiphysics software package (Comsol AB). This method is capable of numerically determining the optical response and near-field distribution of subwavelength periodic structures as a function of illumination orienta...

High-efficiency single-photon detectors.

Visible light photon counters (VLPCs) and solid-state photomultipliers (SSPMs) are high-efficiency single-photon detectors which have multi-photon counting capability. While both the VLPCs and the SSPMs have inferred internal quantum efficiencies above 93%, the actual measured values for both the detectors were in fact limited to less than 88%, attributed to in-coupling losses. We are currently...

Polar-azimuthal angle dependent efficiency of different infrared superconducting nanowire single-photon detector designs

The illumination-angle-dependent absorptance was determined for three types of superconducting-nanowire singlephoton detector (SNSPD) designs: 1. periodic bare niobium-nitride (NbN) stripes with dimensions of conventional SNSPDs, 2. the same NbN patterns integrated with ~quarter-wavelength hydrogensilsesquioxane-filled nanocavity, 3. similar cavity-integrated structures covered by a thin gold r...

Nano-Optical Studies of Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors