We present performance and practical criteria to evaluate different approaches for photon-number resolving (PNR) detection for quantum communication and computing. We present a novel parallel SNSPD that performs well on all the criteria.

We report on a high-efficiency multipixel SNSPD array detecting at > 1.5 GHz and that has excellent photon-number resolving (PNR) capability at 1550 nm. This device enables ultrafast QKD with > 60 Mbps secret key rate, and also PNR detection with high n-photon efficiencies for photonic quantum processors with various types of photon sources.

Since their inception, superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors have been enabling quantum optical applications and the rise of the photonic quantum industry. The evolution in the detector design and read-out strategies has led to the introduction of devices with a plurality of independent pixels, which have been able to operate with high system detection efficiency at high speed while also supporting photon number resolution capabilities. However, this comes at the cost of a complex readout that requires one coaxial cable for each pixel of the array. Here, we report a 28-pixel SNSPD with a dedicated parallel architecture that, while maintaining a simple readout with a single coaxial line, enables the detector to operate at high speed with low-performance degradation. The device shows a maximum single-photon efficiency of 88% and is able to maintain its efficiency above 50%, coupled with a timing jitter lower than 80 ps, up to a detection rate of 200 million counts per second. The detector also provides state-of-the-art photon-number-resolving performances with a 2-photon efficiency of 75% and a 3-photon efficiency of 62%.

We report on Mo-Si-based superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors on a gallium arsenide substrate. Mo-Si deposited on a passivated GaAs surface has the same critical temperature as Mo-Si deposited on silicon. The critical temperature decreases slightly on depositing Mo-Si directly on the native oxide of GaAs. Hence, Mo-Si works well as a thin-film superconductor on GaAs. We propose that the amorphous structure of Mo-Si ensures compatibility with the GaAs matrix. Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are fabricated with Mo-Si on GaAs using a meander-wire design. The SNSPD metrics are very similar to those of devices fabricated with the same procedure on a silicon substrate. We observe a plateau in the response-versus-bias curve, signaling a saturated internal quantum efficiency. The plateau remains even at an elevated temperature, 2.2 K, at a wavelength of 980 nm. We achieve a timing jitter of 50 ps and a recovery time of 29 ns. These results point to the promise of integrating Mo-Si SNSPDs with GaAs photonic circuits.

We conduct 3D mapping of cryogenic temperatures via a Raman-based distributed temperature sensor, employing standard telecom single-mode fibers and polarization-independent superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs). By coiling a test fiber around various stages of a liquid helium cooled cryostat, our device demonstrates a lower temperature sensing limit of (48 ± 2) K, below the nitrogen boiling point. This achievement is made possible by the low dark count rates of SNSPDs, as validated by theoretical simulations. Furthermore, we utilize our device to map cryogenic temperatures on the 350 cm2 surface of a specially designed hollow cylindrical aluminum sample, accommodating approximately 2 m of standard single-mode optical fiber. During nitrogen cooling, we monitor the temporal evolution of the spatially dependent temperature gradient on the metallic sample with a temporal sampling down to one minute. Fiber-based distributed temperature sensing with centimetric spatial resolution can be effectively applied for 3D mapping at cryogenic temperatures of superconducting, quantum computing and aerospace instrumentation.

A 28-pixel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector in a parallel con-figuration is presented, displaying high photon-number efficiencies and 250 Mcps detection rate using only one coaxial cable.

Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have enabled the realization of several quantum optics technologies thanks to their high system detection efficiency (SDE), low dark counts, and fast recovery time. However, the widespread use of linear optical quantum computing, quasi-deterministic single-photon sources, and quantum repeaters requires even faster detectors that can also distinguish between different photon-number states. Here, we present an SNSPD array composed of 14 independent pixels, achieving an SDE of 90% in the telecommunications band. By reading each pixel of the array independently, we show detection of telecommunication photons at 1.5 GHz with 45% absolute SDE. We exploit the dynamic photon-number resolution of the array to demonstrate accurate state reconstruction for a wide range of light inputs, including operation with long-duration light pulses, as obtained with some cavity-based sources. We show two-photon and three-photon fidelities of 74% and 57%, respectively, which represent state-of-the-art results for fiber-coupled SNSPDs.

Heralded single-photon sources (HSPS) intrinsically suffer from multiphoton emission, leading to a trade-off between the source’s single-photon quality and the heralding rate. A solution to this problem is to use photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors to filter out the heralding events where more than one photon pair is created. Here, we demonstrate an improvement of a HSPS by heralding photons using a high-efficiency parallel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (P-SNSPD) with PNR power. Specifically, we show a reduction in the g ( 2 ) ( 0 ) of the heralded single photon by ( 26.9 ± 0.1 ) % for a fixed pump power, or alternatively, an increase in the heralding rate by a factor of 1.368 ± 0.002 for a fixed g ( 2 ) ( 0 ) . We also demonstrate that such a PNR device can reveal thermal photon-number statistics of unheralded photons, which is enabled by our ability to construct its full input–output response function. These results are possible thanks to our P-SNSPD architecture that ensures non-latching operation with no electrical crosstalk, which are essential conditions necessary to obtain the correct photon-number statistics and also faster recovery times, therefore enabling fast heralding rates. These results show that our efficient PNR P-SNSPD architecture can significantly improve the performance of HSPSs and can precisely characterize them, making these detectors a useful tool for a wide range of optical quantum information protocols.

Quantum key distribution has emerged as the most viable scheme to guarantee information security in the presence of large-scale quantum computers and, thanks to the continuous progress made in the past 20 years, it is now commercially available. However, the secret key rates remain limited to just over 10 Mbps due to several bottlenecks on the receiver side. Here we present a custom multipixel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector that is designed to guarantee high count rates and precise timing discrimination. Leveraging the performance of the detector and coupling it to fast acquisition and real-time key distillation electronics, we remove two major roadblocks and achieve a considerable increase of the secret key rates with respect to the state of the art. In combination with a simple 2.5-GHz clocked time-bin quantum key distribution system, we can generate secret keys at a rate of 64 Mbps over a distance of 10.0 km and at a rate of 3.0 Mbps over a distance of 102.4 km with real-time key distillation.

Superconducting-nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have enabled the realization of several quantum optics technologies thanks to their high detection efficiency, low dark-counts, and fast recovery time. Here, we will present a 14-pixel SNSPD array with a maximum system detection efficiency (SDE) of 90% that remains above 80% up to 400 Mcps, and we demonstrate the ability to reach detection rates of 1.5 Gcps with an absolute SDE of 45%. Furthermore, we will explain how such device has been integrated in a QKD set-up and enabled high-speed QKD, with secret-key rates exceeding 60 Mbps over a distance of 10 km. Moreover when used in a QKD setup, the array can improve resilience against blinding attacks by monitoring the coincidence clicks between the pixels. Finally we will show that the detector is able to distinguish few-photon number states in an optical pulse with high fidelity, without posing strict limitations on the shape of the incoming light. We achieve a 2-photon fidelity of 74% and 57% for a 3-photon state, which represent state-of-the-art results for fibre-coupled SNSPDs. Such detectors could find immediate application in LOQC protocols where the capability to distinguish few photon-number states is sufficient – that is, either ‘1’ vs ‘more than 1 photons’.

We report on MoSi-based superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors on a gallium arsenide substrate. MoSi deposited on a passivated GaAs surface has the same critical temperature as MoSi deposited on silicon. The critical temperature decreases slightly on depositing MoSi directly on the native oxide of GaAs. Hence, MoSi works well as a thin-film superconductor on GaAs. We propose that the amorphous structure of MoSi ensures compatibility with the GaAs matrix. Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are fabricated with MoSi on GaAs using a meander-wire design. The SNSPD metrics are very similar to those of devices fabricated with the same procedure on a silicon substrate. We observe a plateau in the response-versus-bias curve signalling a saturated internal quantum efficiency. The plateau remains even at an elevated temperature, 2.2 K, at a wavelength of 980 nm. We achieve a timing jitter of 50 ps and a recovery time of 29 ns. These results point to the promise of integrating MoSi SNSPDs with GaAs photonic circuits.

Photon-number-resolving (PNR) single-photon detectors are an enabling technology in many areas, such as photonic quantum computing, nonclassical light-source characterization, and quantum imaging. Here, we demonstrate high-efficiency PNR detectors using a parallel superconducting nanowire singlephoton-detector (P-SNSPD) architecture that does not suffer from crosstalk between the pixels and that is free of latching. The behavior of the detector is modeled and used to predict the possible outcomes given a certain number of incoming photons. We apply our model to a four-pixel P-SNSPD with a system detection efficiency of 92.5%. We also demonstrate how this detector allows reconstructing the photonnumber statistics of a coherent source of light, which paves the way towards the characterization of the photon statistics of other types of light source using a single detector.

We present a full characterization (efficiency, dark count, recovery time, jit-ter, POVM matrix) of a photon-number-resolving detector based on parallel SNSPD. We construct a model based only on the pixels efficiencies to compute the POVM.

We present a Raman distributed temperature sensor based on standard telecom single mode fibers and efficient polarization-independent superconducting nanowire single photon detectors. Our device shows 3 cm and 1.5 °C resolution on a 5 m fiber upon one minute integration. We show that spatial resolution is limited by the laser pulse width and not by the detection system. Moreover, for long fibers the minimum distance for a measurable temperature step change increases of around 4 cm per km length, because of chromatic dispersion at the Stokes and Anti-Stokes wavelengths. Temperature resolution is mainly affected by the drop in the laser repetition rate when long fibers are tested. On a 500 m fiber, a trade-off of 10 cm and 8 °C resolution is achieved with 3 minutes integration. Fiber-based distributed temperature sensing, combining centimetric spatial resolution with hundreds of meters sensing range, could pave the way for a new kind of applications, such as 2D and 3D temperature mapping of complex electronic devices, particles detectors, cryogenic and aerospace instrumentation.

Triple-photon generation (TPG) is based on a third-order nonlinear optical interaction, which is the most direct way to produce pure quantum three-photon states. These states can exhibit three-body quantum correlations, and their statistics cannot be reproduced by any Gaussian statistics of coherent sources or optical parametric twin-photon generator, making them potentially useful for quantum information processing tasks such as quantum state distillation, quantum error-correction and universal quantum computing. Furthermore, the generation of entangled photon pairs heralded by the detection of a third photon can be used in advanced quantum communication protocols. We made the first experimental demonstration of TPG in 2004 using a bi-stimulation scheme in a bulk KTP crystal, followed by the quantum theory. The new challenges are now to achieve a spontaneous TPG and the corresponding quantum experiments and protocols using oriented ridge KTP waveguides, which ensures both birefringence phase-matching and light confinement. The waveguides are cut by a precision dicing saw. We recently performed their characterization using third-harmonic generation measurements, which showed their good quality. A rate of about 5 triplets per second is expected when pumping a 5-cm-long waveguide with a 5-W 532 nm beam in the CW regime. Such a spontaneous TPG exhibits low rate of triple photons, which makes the certification of quantum features hard. In this article, we review our theoretical and experimental work on TPG and the associated quantum modeling. We also develop theoretical tools for the certification of quantum features of spontaneous triple-photon states. Graphic abstract

Heralded single-photon sources (HSPS) intrinsically suffer from multiphoton emission, leading to a trade-off between the source's quality and the heralding rate. A solution to this problem is to use photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors to filter out the heralding events where more than one photon pair is created. Here, we demonstrate the use of a high-efficiency PNR superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) as a heralding detector for a HSPS. By filtering out higher-order heralding detections, we can reduce the g^(2)(0) of the heralded single photon by (26.6 ± 0.2) %, or alternatively, for a fixed pump power, increasing the heralding rate by a factor of 1.363 ± 0.004 for a fixed g^(2)(0). Additionally, we use the detector to directly measure the photon-number distribution of a thermal mode and calculate the unheralded g^(2)(0). We show the possibility to perform g^(2)(0) measurements with only one PNR detector, with the results in agreement with those obtained by more common-place techniques which use multiple threshold detectors. Our work shows that efficient PNR SNSPDs can significantly improve the performance of HSPSs and can precisely characterize them, making these detectors a useful tool for a wide range of optical quantum information protocols.

Detector blinding attacks have been proposed in the last few years, and they could potentially threaten the security of quantum key distribution systems. Even though such attacks are technically challenging to implement, it is important to consider countermeasures to avoid information leakage. In this paper, we present a countermeasure against these kinds of attacks based on the use of multipixel detectors. We show that with this method, we are able to estimate an upper bound on the information an eavesdropper could have on the key exchanged. Finally, we test a multipixel detector based on superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors to show it can fulfill all the requirements for our countermeasure to be effective.