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2D materials

Superconducting single-photon detectors get hot

Nature Nanotechnology volume 18, pages 322–323 (2023)Cite this article

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High-Tc superconducting nanowire detectors can detect single photons of telecom wavelengths at a temperature of 25 K and may enable applications in quantum sensing and quantum information processing.

From the foundation of modern physics to the recent wave of quantum technologies, single photons and the techniques to detect them have played a decisive role in many scientific breakthroughs. Only last year, the Nobel prize in Physics was awarded for the demonstration of entanglement, which relied critically on single-photon detection. Among established single-photon detector technologies, superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are distinct for their combination of near unity efficiency, their remarkable high time resolution — down to a few picoseconds — as well as their extended wavelength range of single-photon detection (from X-ray to mid-infrared)1. SNSPDs have already become the detector of choice in fields such as quantum photonic computation and quantum communication. However, due to their low operation condition (below liquid helium temperature, 4.2 K), their widespread utilization in other scientific domains, such as biology and astronomy, has yet to be established. Charaev et al.2 and Merino et al.3 now independently demonstrate single-photon detection with SNSPDs based on high-Tc superconductors, operating at temperatures above the liquid helium temperature limit.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of the Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+δ (BSCCO) nanowire fabrication process from2.

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  • 24 March 2023

    In the version of this article initially published, publication details for ref. 3 were not included and are now amended in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, Department of Quantum Nanoscience, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands

    Jin Chang

  2. Department of Imaging Physics (ImPhys), Faculty of Applied Sciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Iman Esmaeil Zadeh

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  1. Jin Chang
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  2. Iman Esmaeil Zadeh
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Correspondence to Jin Chang or Iman Esmaeil Zadeh.

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Competing interests

I.E.Z. is a research scientist at Single Quantum B.V., Delft, the Netherlands. J.C. declares no competing interests.

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Chang, J., Esmaeil Zadeh, I. Superconducting single-photon detectors get hot. Nat. Nanotechnol. 18, 322–323 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-023-01334-1

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