Superconducting nanowire multi-photon detectors enabled by current reservoirs

Single-photon detectors are ubiquitous devices in quantum-photonic-based communication,computation,metrology,and sensing.In these applications,N-fold coincidence photon counting is often needed,for example,to characterize entanglement.However,N-fold coincidence photon counting typically requires N individual singlephoton detectors and associated bias and readout electronics,and these resources could become prohibitive if N goes large and the detectors need to work at cryogenic temperatures.Here,to break this limit on N,we propose a device architecture based on N cascaded photosensitive superconducting nanowires and one wider nanowire that functions as a current reservoir.We show that by strategically designing the device,the network of these superconducting nanowires can work in a synergic manner as an n-photon detector,where n can be from 1 to N,depending on the bias conditions.We therefore name the devices of this type superconducting nanowire multi-photon detectors(SNMPDs).In addition to its simple one-port bias and readout circuitry,the coincidences are counted internally in the detector,eliminating the need for external multi-channel,time-correlated pulse counters.We believe that the SNMPDs proposed in this work could open avenues towards conveniently measuring high-order temporal correlations of light and characterizing multi-photon entanglement.