Masahiro Yabuno

Stable, high-performance operation of a fiber-coupled superconducting nanowire avalanche photon detector

Recent progress in the development of superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SSPD or SNSPD) has delivered excellent performance, and has had a great impact on a range of research fields. Significant efforts are being made to further improve the technology, and a primary concern remains to resolve the trade-offs between detection efficiency (DE), timing jitter, and response speed. We present a stable and high-performance fiber-coupled niobium titanium nitride superconducting nanowire avalanche photon detector (SNAP) that resolves these trade-offs. Autocorrelation function measurement revealed an afterpulse-free operation in serially connected two SNAP (SC-2SNAP), even in the absence of a choke inductor, achieving a 7.65 times faster response speed than standard SSPDs. The SC-2SNAP device showed a system detection efficiency (SDE) of 81.0% with wide bias current margin, a dark count rate of 6.8 counts/s, and full width at half maximum timing jitter of 68 ps, operating in a practical Gifford-McMahon cryocooler system.

Polarization insensitive frequency conversion for an atom-photon entanglement distribution via a telecom network

Long-lifetime quantum storages accessible to the telecom photonic infrastructure are essential to long-distance quantum communication. Atomic quantum storages have achieved subsecond storage time corresponding to 1000 km transmission time for a telecom photon through a quantum repeater algorithm. However, the telecom photon cannot be directly interfaced to typical atomic storages. Solid-state quantum frequency conversions fill this wavelength gap. Here we report on the experimental demonstration of a polarization-insensitive solid-state quantum frequency conversion to a telecom photon from a short-wavelength photon entangled with an atomic ensemble. Atom–photon entanglement has been generated with a Rb atomic ensemble and the photon has been translated to telecom range while retaining the entanglement by our nonlinear-crystal-based frequency converter in a Sagnac interferometer.Quantum repeater-based communication requires the ability to interface good quantum memories to telecom photons. Here, the authors report polarization-insensitive frequency conversion to telecom wavelength of a photon entangled with a Rb ensemble, preserving the entanglement in the process.

Superconducting coincidence photon detector with short timing jitter

We demonstrate the operation of a coincidence photon detector with a short timing jitter consisting of two superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SSPDs) and a single flux quantum (SFQ) circuit. By utilizing the timing discrimination capability of the SFQ coincidence circuit, the full width at half maximum timing jitter of the entire coincidence photon detector was evaluated as 32.3 ps, which is 36 ps less than that of the standard commercial time correlated single photon counting module, and the timing jitter of the SSPD was estimated as ∼15 ps. Owing to the short timing jitter characteristics, our coincidence photon detector could correctly capture the effect of pulse-width broadening by insertion of an optical bandpass filter. We have also demonstrated that our coincidence photon detection clearly shows Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with a weak coherent pulse. These results are a crucial step to realizing high timing resolution coincidence measurements, ushering in a technology for timing measurement based multi-photon quantum interference.