Improving the dynamic range of single photon counting kinetic inductance detectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coordinate transformation to correct nonlinearity in MKID readouts, significantly enhancing the detector's dynamic range and resolving power for photon energies.

Contribution

A novel coordinate transformation method improves MKID performance by compensating for nonlinearity, increasing the dynamic range and photon resolution capabilities.

Findings

Enhanced resolving power from 6.8 to 17 at 400 nm wavelength.

Improved dynamic range of the detector.

Effective nonlinearity compensation using the new coordinate system.

Abstract

We develop a simple coordinate transformation which can be employed to compensate for the nonlinearity introduced by a Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detector's (MKID) homodyne readout scheme. This coordinate system is compared to the canonically used polar coordinates and is shown to improve the performance of the filtering method often used to estimate a photon's energy. For a detector where the coordinate nonlinearity is primarily responsible for limiting its resolving power, this technique leads to increased dynamic range, which we show by applying the transformation to data from a hafnium MKID designed to be sensitive to photons with wavelengths in the 800 to 1300 nm range. The new coordinates allow the detector to resolve photons with wavelengths down to 400 nm, raising the resolving power at that wavelength from 6.8 to 17.