Photon counting with photon number resolution through superconducting nanowires coupled to a multi-channel TDC in FPGA

Abstract

The paper presents a system for measuring photon statistics and photon timing in the few-photon regime down to the single-photon level. The measurement system is based on superconducting nanowire single photon detectors and a time-to-digital converter implemented into a programmable device. The combination of these devices gives high performance to the system in terms of resolution and adaptability to the actual experimental conditions. As a case of application, we present the measurement of photon statistics for coherent light states. In this measurement, we make use of 8th order single photon correlations to reconstruct with high fidelity the statistics of a coherent state with average photon number up to 4. The processing is performed by means of a tapped-delay-line time-to-digital converter architecture that also hosts an asynchronous-correlated-digital-counter implemented in a field programmable gate array device and specifically designed for performance optimization in multi-channel usage.

Perspectives for Applications of Quantum Imaging

“…Developed only in 2001, SNSPDs are already commercially available, however, rather expensive. As recent research results indicate, they can in principle resolve photon numbers, but as of now there is no practicable and commercially available implementation using this capability. The same holds true for achieving 2D spatial resolution or the arrangement as 1D detector array …”

Digital instrument with configurable hardware and firmware for multi-channel time measures

“…In this way, it is possible to discard useless data with important memory and bandwidth saving. 29,30 This work deals with the design and realization of a full programmable and multichannel instrument for timing of signals, which is based on a recent TDC architecture tailored for the last generation FPGA devices as IP-core. The instrument structure is a hardware, firmware, and software bundle for high-performance time measures in experiments where very fine time resolving is a primary request.…”

“…For instance, this technique is suited for discriminating real events from dark counts, thus improving the efficiency. 30 In this way, the bandwidth of the interconnection between TDC and PC and the storage memory are only occupied by those timestamps that are filtered by the firmware.…”

“…55 At last, an achievable high channel rate was essential in photon statistic experiments. 30 Fundamental in several of these applications was the availability of different acquisition modes, thus fulfilling requirements of different experimental conditions and detectors used.…”

Velocity space degrees of freedom of plasma fluctuations

“…However, there is a demodulation process that may be done at the time of measurement. This technique (Pelissier and Sadeghi, 1996) (Naylor, 2010;Lovell et al, 2016;Balboa et al, 2010), they are quickly becoming cost effective enough and user friendly enough to be used in smaller laboratories (Schwettmann et al, 2011;Ryou and Simon, 2017;Lusardi et al, 2017).…”