781 Mbit/s photon-counting optical communications using a superconducting nanowire detector
Bryan S. Robinson, Andrew J. Kerman, Eric A. Dauler, Richard J. Barron, David O. Caplan, Mark L. Stevens, John Carney, Scott A. Hamilton, Joel K. W. Yang, Karl K. Berggren · Optics Letters · 2006
We demonstrate 1550 nm photon-counting optical communications with a NbN-nanowire superconducting single-photon detector. Source data are encoded with a rate-1/2 forward-error correcting code and transmitted by use of 32-ary pulse-position modulation at 5 and 10 GHz slot rates. Error-free performance is obtained with -0.5 detected photon per source bit at a source data rate of 781 Mbits/s. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported data rate for a photon-counting receiver.