Nanosecond gating of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors using cryogenic bias circuitry

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates nanosecond-scale active gating of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors using cryogenic bias circuitry, enabling improved temporal control and increased dynamic range for photon counting applications.

Contribution

It introduces a cryogenic electronic gating method for SNSPDs with tunable gate windows and minimal impact on efficiency and jitter, enhancing their application scope.

Findings

Achieved 2.4 ns rise time and 5 ns gate length for SNSPD gating.

Demonstrated 11.2-fold increase in photon counting dynamic range.

Enabled temporal filtering in pump-probe experiments.

Abstract

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) show near unity efficiency, low dark count rate, and short recovery time. Combining these characteristics with temporal control of SNSPDs broadens their applications as in active de-latching for higher dynamic range counting or temporal filtering for pump-probe spectroscopy or LiDAR. To that end, we demonstrate active gating of an SNSPD with a minimum off-to-on rise time of 2.4 ns and a total gate length of 5.0 ns. We show how the rise time depends on the inductance of the detector in combination with the control electronics. The gate window is demonstrated to be fully and freely, electrically tunable up to 500 ns at a repetition rate of 1.0 MHz, as well as ungated, free-running operation. Control electronics to generate the gating are mounted on the 2.3 K stage of a closed-cycle sorption cryostat, while the detector is operated on the cold stage at 0.8 K. We show that the efficiency and timing jitter of the detector is not altered during the on-time of the gating window. We exploit gated operation to demonstrate a method to increase in the photon counting dynamic range by a factor 11.2, as well as temporal filtering of a strong pump in an emulated pump-probe experiment.