Plasmonic structure integrated superconducting nanowire single-photon detector with BSCCO stripes

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that integrating plasmonic nanostructures with superconducting BSCCO nanowire detectors significantly enhances photon absorption efficiency, with optimized designs achieving over tenfold improvements at normal incidence.

Contribution

It introduces novel plasmonic nanostructure designs for SNSPDs that substantially improve absorption efficiency and response time compared to traditional meandered patterns.

Findings

Over tenfold increase in absorptance at normal incidence.

NCTAI design offers faster response due to smaller filling factor.

Optimized nanocavity structures outperform standard cavities.

Abstract

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) were integrated with plasmonic nanostructures to enhance the absorption efficiency of superconducting BSCCO stripes. A numerical investigation of optimized nanocavity array (NCAI) and nanocavity-trench-array (NCTAI) SNSPDs has revealed that more than one order of magnitude larger absorptance can be achieved at perpendicular incidence, when compared to the corresponding meandered BSCCO pattern in a resonant optical cavity. The SNSPDs were considerably improved either via first and third quarter cavity resonances, as evidenced by the near-field maps and validated by the standard retrieval method. Although, NCAI-SNSPD exhibits slightly larger absorptance, NCTAI-SNSPD remains competitive due to its larger period and significantly smaller filling factor, thereby allowing for quicker electric response.