A superconducting-nanowire single-photon camera with 400,000 pixels

Abstract

For the last 50 years, superconducting detectors have offered exceptional sensitivity and speed for detecting faint electromagnetic signals in a wide range of applications. These detectors operate at very low temperatures and generate a minimum of excess noise, making them ideal for testing the non-local nature of reality, investigating dark matter, mapping the early universe, and performing quantum computation and communication. Despite their appealing properties, however, there are currently no large-scale superconducting cameras - even the largest demonstrations have never exceeded 20 thousand pixels. This is especially true for one of the most promising detector technologies, the superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD). These detectors have been demonstrated with system detection efficiencies of 98.0%, sub-3-ps timing jitter, sensitivity from the ultraviolet (250nm) to the mid-infrared (10um), and dark count rates below 6.2e-6 counts per second (cps), but despite more than two decades of development they have never achieved an array size larger than a kilopixel. Here, we report on the implementation and characterization of a 400,000 pixel SNSPD camera, a factor of 400 improvement over the previous state-of-the-art. The array spanned an area 4x2.5 mm with a 5x5um resolution, reached unity quantum efficiency at wavelengths of 370 nm and 635 nm, counted at a rate of 1.1e5 cps, and had a dark count rate of 1e-4 cps per detector (corresponding to 0.13 cps over the whole array). The imaging area contains no ancillary circuitry and the architecture is scalable well beyond the current demonstration, paving the way for large-format superconducting cameras with 100% fill factors and near-unity detection efficiencies across a vast range of the electromagnetic spectrum.