Eight-fold signal amplification of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector using a multiple-avalanche architecture
Qingyuan Zhao, Adam N. McCaughan, Andrew E. Dane, Faraz Najafi, Francesco Bellei, Domenico De Fazio, Kristen A. Sunter, Yachin Ivry, Karl K. Berggren · Optics Express · 2014
Superconducting nanowire avalanche single-photon detectors (SNAPs) with n parallel nanowires are advantageous over single-nanowire detectors because their output signal amplitude scales linearly with n. However, the SNAP architecture has not been viably demonstrated for n > 4. To increase n for larger signal amplification, we designed a multi-stage, successive-avalanche architecture which used nanowires, connected via choke inductors in a binary-tree layout. We demonstrated an avalanche detector with n = 8 parallel nanowires and achieved eight-fold signal amplification, with a timing jitter of 54 ps.