Niobium nitride plasmonic perfect absorbers for tunable infrared superconducting nanowire photodetection

Abstract

Quantum technologies such as quantum computing and quantum cryptography exhibit rapid progress. This requires the provision of high-quality photodetectors and the ability to efficiently detect single photons. Hence, conventional avalanche photodiodes for single photon detection are not the first choice anymore. A better alternative are superconducting nanowire single photon detectors, which use the superconducting to normal conductance phase transition. One big challenge is to reduce the product between recovery time and detection efficiency. To address this problem, we enhance the absorption using resonant plasmonic perfect absorber effects, to reach near-100% absorption over small areas. This is aided by the high resonant absorption cross section and the angle insensitivity of plasmonic resonances. In this work we present a superconducting niobium nitride plasmonic perfect absorber structure and use its tunable plasmonic resonance to create a polarization dependent photodetector with near-100% absorption efficiency in the infrared spectral range. Further we fabricated a detector and investigated its response to an external light source. We also demonstrate the resonant plasmonic behavior which manifests itself through a polarization dependence detector response.