Improving the timing jitter of a superconducting nanowire single-photon detection system

Abstract

Low timing jitter is a unique merit of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) for time-correlated applications. Quantitative analysis was performed for the SNSPD system. Aided by an oscilloscope with an optimal signal amplitude, we were able to measure a full width at half-maximum system timing jitter as low as 14.2 ps for a high-switching-current SNSPD using a room-temperature low-noise amplifier. When using a time-correlated single-photon counting module, the system timing jitter was 17.3 ps. The detector's intrinsic timing jitter was estimated at ∼12.0 ps.