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A photon-number-resolving detector based on a four-element superconducting nanowire single photon detector is demonstrated to have sub-30-ps resolution in measuring the arrival time of individual photons. This detector can be used to characterize the photon statistics of non-pulsed light sources and to mitigate dead-time effects in high-speed photon counting applications. Furthermore, a 25% system detection efficiency at 1550 nm was demonstrated, making the detector useful for both low-flux source characterization and high-speed photon-counting and quantum communication applications. The design, fabrication and testing of this detector are described, and a comparison between the measured and theoretical performance is presented.Keywords: photon-number-resolution; superconducting nanowire single photon detector; timing jitter; system detection efficiency _____________________ *Corresponding author. Email: edauler@mit.edu Photon-number-resolution with sub-30-ps timing using multi-element superconducting nanowire single photon detectorsA photon-number-resolving detector based on a four-element superconducting nanowire single photon detector is demonstrated to have sub-30-ps resolution in measuring the arrival time of individual photons. This detector can be used to characterize the photon statistics of non-pulsed light sources and to mitigate dead-time effects in high-speed photon counting applications. Furthermore, a 25% system detection efficiency at 1550 nm was demonstrated, making the detector useful for both low-flux source characterization and high-speed photon-counting and quantum communication applications. The design, fabrication and testing of this detector are described, and a comparison between the measured and theoretical performance is presented.

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.