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arXiv · 2511.13475

Extracting Photon-Number Information from Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors Traces via Mean-Derivative Projection

I. S. Kuijf·F. B. Baalbergen·L. Seldenthuis·E. P. L. van Nieuwenburg·M. J. A. de Dood
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Abstract

Photon-number resolved detection with superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) attracts increasing interest, but lacks a systematic framework for interpreting and benchmarking this capability. In this work, we combine principal component analysis (PCA) with a new readout technique to explore the photon-number resolving capabilities of SNSPDs and find that the information of the photon number is contained in a single principal component which approximates the time derivative of the average response trace. We introduce a new confidence metric based on the Bhattacharyya coefficient to quantify the photon-number-resolving capabilities of a detector system and show that this metric can be used to compare different systems. Our analysis and interpretation of the principal components imply that photon-number resolution in SNSPDs can be achieved with moderate hardware requirements in terms of both sample rate (5 GSample/sec) and analog bandwidth (3 GHz) and could be implemented in an FPGA, giving a highly scalable solution for real-time photon counting.

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BibTeXRIS

I. S. Kuijf, F. B. Baalbergen, L. Seldenthuis, E. P. L. van Nieuwenburg, M. J. A. de Dood. 2025-11-17. Extracting Photon-Number Information from Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors Traces via Mean-Derivative Projection. https://doi.org/10.1103/dwth-wjtr

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