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

Nature volume 622, pages 730–734 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

For the past 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 reality1,2, investigating dark matter3,4, mapping the early universe5,6,7 and performing quantum computation8,9,10 and communication11,12,13,14. Despite their appealing properties, however, there are at present no large-scale superconducting cameras—even the largest demonstrations have never exceeded 20,000 pixels15. This is especially true for superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs)16,17,18. These detectors have been demonstrated with system detection efficiencies of 98.0% (ref. 19), sub-3-ps timing jitter20, sensitivity from the ultraviolet21 to the mid-infrared22 and microhertz dark-count rates3, but have never achieved an array size larger than a kilopixel23,24. Here we report on the development of a 400,000-pixel SNSPD camera, a factor of 400 improvement over the state of the art. The array spanned an area of 4 × 2.5 mm with 5 × 5-μm resolution, reached unity quantum efficiency at wavelengths of 370 nm and 635 nm, counted at a rate of 1.1 × 105 counts per second (cps) and had a dark-count rate of 1.0 × 10−4 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 present demonstration, paving the way for large-format superconducting cameras with near-unity detection efficiencies across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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Fig. 1: Overview of the 800 × 500 camera.
Fig. 2: Electrical operation of the detectors and readout bus.
Fig. 3: Resolving all pixels using flood illumination with a Gaussian spot.
Fig. 4: Timing characterization of the camera.

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Data availability

Unprocessed time tags and data used to produce images and graphs shown in Figs. 1, 3 and 4 are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Code used to process the time tags and produce images shown in Figs. 1 and 4 is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. Part of this research was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA (contract no. 80NM0018D0004). A.N.M. was supported in part by NASA APRA through grant no. NNH17ZDA001N. Support for this work was provided in part by the DARPA DSO Invisible Headlights programme. Certain equipment, instruments, software or materials, commercial or non-commercial, are identified in this paper to specify the experimental procedure adequately. Such identification is not intended to imply recommendation or endorsement of any product or service by NIST nor is it intended to imply that the materials or equipment identified are necessarily the best available for the purpose. This research was financed by NIST, University of Colorado Boulder (https://ror.org/02ttsq026) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (https://ror.org/027k65916).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO, USA

    B. G. Oripov, D. S. Rampini, S. W. Nam & A. N. McCaughan

  2. Department of Physics, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    B. G. Oripov & D. S. Rampini

  3. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    J. Allmaras, M. D. Shaw & B. Korzh

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  1. B. G. Oripov
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Contributions

A.N.M., B.K. and B.G.O. conceptualized these experiments. Fabrication of devices was done by B.G.O. Measurements were performed by B.G.O., D.S.R. and A.N.M. Analysis and interpretation of the data was done by B.G.O., S.W.N., M.D.S., B.K. and J.A. A.N.M. directed and supervised this work. B.G.O. and A.N.M. prepared the manuscript, with input from all co-authors.

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Correspondence to B. G. Oripov.

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Oripov, B.G., Rampini, D.S., Allmaras, J. et al. A superconducting nanowire single-photon camera with 400,000 pixels. Nature 622, 730–734 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06550-2

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