Timing Jitter Induced by Stochastic Baseline Fluctuations in High-Count-Rate Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors

TL;DR

This paper reveals that stochastic baseline fluctuations due to finite-memory readout dynamics are a fundamental source of timing jitter in high-count-rate superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors, affecting their timing resolution.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic-process framework that links photon statistics, readout dynamics, and timing jitter, providing insights for optimizing high-speed photon-counting systems.

Findings

Baseline fluctuations cause count-rate-dependent timing jitter.

The framework predicts a nonmonotonic dependence of jitter on photon repetition rate.

Experimental data confirms the predicted scaling behaviors.

Abstract

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have demonstrated timing jitter in the few-picosecond regime, yet their timing resolution deteriorates substantially under high-count-rate operation. Existing interpretations mainly attribute this degradation to deterministic waveform distortions, such as multiphoton responses and pulse pile-up, yet the experimentally observed jitter broadening at high count rates cannot be fully accounted for within this picture. Here, we show that stochastic baseline fluctuations arising from finite-memory readout dynamics constitute an intrinsic source of the count-rate-dependent timing jitter in SNSPD systems. For stochastically arriving photons, overlapping recovery responses accumulate in the readout chain and generate statistically fluctuating baselines, which are converted into timing uncertainty through threshold-based timing extraction. We develop a stochastic-process framework that quantitatively connects photon statistics, readout dynamics, and timing jitter. The framework predicts characteristic scaling behaviors, including a nonmonotonic dependence of baseline fluctuations under pulsed excitation with a maximum near half of the repetition frequency. These predictions are quantitatively verified through systematic variations of count rate, circuit time constant, and detector dynamical properties. Our results identify stochastic baseline dynamics as a fundamental mechanism limiting timing resolution in high-count-rate SNSPD operation and provide a general framework for optimizing finite-memory high-speed photon-counting systems.