Pulse-gated mode of commercial superconducting nanowire single photon detectors

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/abc2c2

Abstract High detection efficiency and low intrinsic dark count rate are two advantages of superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs). However, the stray photons penetrated into the fiber would cause the extrinsic dark count rate, owing to the free running mode of SNSPDs. In order to improve the performance of SNSPDs in realistic scenarios, stray photons should be investigated and suppression methods should be adopted. In this study, we demonstrate the pulse-gated mode, with 500 kHz gating frequency, of a commercial SNSPD system for suppressing the response of stray photons about three orders of magnitude than its free-running counterpart on the extreme test conditions. When we push the gating frequency to 8 MHz, the dark count rate still keeps under 4% of free-running mode. In experiments, the intrinsic dark count rate is also suppressed to 4.56× 10^-2 counts per second with system detection efficiency of 76.4372%. Furthermore, the time-correlated single-photon counting analysis also approves the validity of our mode in suppressing the responses of stray photons.

Keywords: quantum detector superconducting nanowire pulse gated dark count rate

Received: 08 August 2020
Revised: 15 September 2020
Accepted manuscript online: 20 October 2020

PACS:	03.67.Dd	(Quantum cryptography and communication security)
	03.67.Hk	(Quantum communication)
	03.67.-a	(Quantum information)

Fund: Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61605248) and the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2013CB338002).

Corresponding Authors: ^†Corresponding author. E-mail: jmusheng@139.com

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Fan Liu(刘帆), Mu-Sheng Jiang(江木生), Yi-Fei Lu(陆宜飞), Yang Wang(汪洋), and Wan-Su Bao(鲍皖苏) Pulse-gated mode of commercial superconducting nanowire single photon detectors 2021 Chin. Phys. B 30 040302

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