Lithium-Niobate-on-Insulator Waveguide-Integrated Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates waveguide-integrated superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors on lithium niobate, achieving high efficiency and low noise, enabling integrated quantum photonic circuits with sources, filters, and gates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of superconducting nanowire detectors on thin-film lithium niobate, combining high efficiency with the material's nonlinear properties for quantum photonics.

Findings

On-chip detection efficiency of 46% achieved.

High performance in dark count rate and timing jitter.

Potential for fully integrated quantum photonic chips.

Abstract

We demonstrate waveguide-integrated superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors on thin-film lithium niobate (LN). Using a 250 um-long NbN superconducting nanowire lithographically defined on top of a 125 um-long LN nanowaveguide, on-chip detection efficiency of 46% is realized with simultaneous high performance in dark count rate and timing jitter. As LN possesses high second-order nonlinear \c{hi}(2) and electro-optic properties, an efficient single-photon detector on thin-film LN opens up the possibility to construct small scale fully-integrated quantum photonic chip which includes single-photon sources, filters, tunable quantum gates and detectors.