Single-channel electronic readout of a multipixel superconducting nanowire single photon detector

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel time-over-threshold readout method for superconducting nanowire single photon detector arrays, enabling pixel counting without degrading timing or adding heat, scalable with signal-to-noise ratio.

Contribution

The paper presents a new single-channel readout technique for SNSPD arrays that preserves timing jitter and count rate, demonstrated on a four-pixel device.

Findings

Readout preserves intrinsic timing jitter.

Scales linearly with signal-to-noise ratio.

No additional heat load on cryostat.

Abstract

We present a time-over-threshold readout technique to count the number of activated pixels from an array of superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs). This technique maintains the intrinsic timing jitter of the individual pixels, places no additional heatload on the cryostat, and retains the intrinsic count rate of the time-tagger. We demonstrate proof-of-principle operation with respect to a four-pixel device. Furthermore, we show that, given some permissible error threshold, the number of pixels that can be reliably read out scales linearly with the intrinsic signal-to-noise ratio of the individual pixel response.