Eight-fold signal amplification of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector using a multiple-avalanche architecture

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an eight-fold signal amplification in superconducting nanowire avalanche single-photon detectors by implementing a multi-stage, binary-tree architecture, overcoming previous limitations for larger n values.

Contribution

The authors introduce a multi-stage, successive-avalanche architecture for SNAPs, enabling scalable amplification beyond n=4 nanowires.

Findings

Achieved eight-fold signal amplification with n=8 nanowires.

Demonstrated timing jitter of 54 ps.

Validated the multi-stage avalanche architecture for larger arrays.

Abstract

Superconducting nanowire avalanche single-photon detectors (SNAPs) with n parallel nanowires are advantageous over single-nanowire detectors because their output signal amplitude scales linearly with n. However, the SNAP architecture has not been viably demonstrated for n > 4. To increase n for larger signal amplification, we designed a multi-stage, successive-avalanche architecture which used nanowires, connected via choke inductors in a binary-tree layout. We demonstrated an avalanche detector with n = 8 parallel nanowires and achieved eight-fold signal amplification, with a timing jitter of 54 ps.