Integrated-photonic characterization of single-photon detectors for use in neuromorphic synapses

TL;DR

This paper presents integrated-photonic techniques for characterizing superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors, demonstrating their suitability for neural communication by showing consistent binary responses over a wide photon range and tunable pulse outputs.

Contribution

It introduces integrated-photonic structures for simultaneous detector characterization and demonstrates their application in neural systems with consistent binary responses and tunable outputs.

Findings

Detectors show identical responses across a wide photon number range.

Response is independent of incident photon number, suitable for neural communication.

Room-temperature measurements reliably predict cryogenic detector properties.

Abstract

We show several techniques for using integrated-photonic waveguide structures to simultaneously characterize multiple waveguide-integrated superconducting-nanowire detectors with a single fiber input. The first set of structures allows direct comparison of detector performance of waveguide-integrated detectors with various widths and lengths. The second type of demonstrated integrated-photonic structure allows us to achieve detection with a high dynamic range. This device allows a small number of detectors to count photons across many orders of magnitude in count rate. However, we find a stray light floor of -30 dB limits the dynamic range to three orders of magnitude. To assess the utility of the detectors for use in synapses in spiking neural systems, we measured the response with average incident photon numbers ranging from less than $10^{-3}$ to greater than $10$. The detector response is identical across this entire range, indicating that synaptic responses based on these detectors will be independent of the number of incident photons in a communication pulse. Such a binary response is ideal for communication in neural systems. We further demonstrate that the response has a linear dependence of output current pulse height on bias current with up to a factor of 1.7 tunability in pulse height. Throughout the work, we compare room-temperature measurements to cryogenic measurements. The agreement indicates room-temperature measurements can be used to determine important properties of the detectors.