Large single-photon detector opens door to high energy physics, dark matter, and more
Large single-photon detector opens door to high energy physics, dark matter, and more lead image
Single-photon detection is vital for many applications including quantum information science, astronomy, and LiDAR. The highest performing technology for a wide range of wavelengths, superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) produce far fewer false counts than their conventional counterparts, and can be designed to operate very efficiently at wavelengths of interest.
But SNSPD development has mostly centered around applications requiring relatively small photoactive areas in the submillimeter range. High energy physics and dark matter detection applications need photosensitive areas in the millimeter range and beyond.
Luskin et al. demonstrated amorphous superconducting materials that can be readily made into homogeneous large area thin superconducting films along with a new device architecture for more scalable fabrication.
“Materials such as molybdenum silicide (MoSi) and tungsten silicide (WSi) yield highly uniform films due to their amorphous nature,” said author Jamie Luskin. “Also, in WSi, changing the silicon content gives us a nice knob with which we can tune the material properties and superconducting transition temperature.”
The team also devised a new device architecture it calls the superconducting microwire single-photon detector (SMSPD) to accommodate larger photoactive areas with more complex geometries.
“Micron-scale wires can be patterned using optical lithography, allowing for many microwire structures to be written in parallel and greatly reducing time and resources to fabricate large devices,” said Luskin. “In principle, this should also enable us to surpass the approximately 1mm2 limit of e-beam lithography-based fabrication.”
The devices fabricated by the team are the first SMSPD arrays demonstrated, and the largest active-area SNSPD or SMSPD arrays with near-infrared sensitivity. These detectors have been installed in two different novel dark matter detection pilot experiments.
Source: “Large active-area superconducting microwire detector array with single-photon sensitivity in the near-infrared,” by Jamie S. Luskin, Ekkehart Schmidt, Boris Korzh, Andrew D. Beyer, Bruce Bumble, Jason P. Allmaras, Alexander B. Walter, Emma E. Wollman, Lautaro Narváez, Varun B. Verma, Sae Woo Nam, Ilya Charaev, Marco Colangelo, Karl K. Berggren, Cristián Peña, Maria Spiropulu, Maurice Garcia-Sciveres, Stephen Derenzo, and Matthew D. Shaw, Applied Physics Letters (2023). The article can be accessed at http://doi.org/10.1063/5.0150282 .
