Readout Electronics of Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors

Download or read book Readout Electronics of Superconducting Nanowire Single Photon Detectors written by Edward Benjamine Ramirez and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, space missions such as, the Cassini spacecraft, the Juno spacecraft, and the Curiosity rover mission have helped form a better understanding of our solar system. Often times, space missions try to tackle big questions, for example, "Is there life on Mars?". Thus, space exploration is at the forefront in helping humanity understand the origins of human life. Recently, water was found on Mars, which hadn't been known before. Commonly, communication from space missions have been facilitated by radio frequency (RF) technologies, which impact the design of the spacecraft. Engineers and scientists have to cleverly design a spacecraft with an antenna, which can be heavy and may require a lot power to operate. Thus, the quest to facilitate a new means of communication between a spacecraft and ground terminals is something of ongoing interest. Recently, advancements in laser communication technologies has paved the way to help facilitate a new means of communication. Free space optical communications is a technology with relies on photons, the quantum of light, to both send and receive data via lasers. The recent NASA Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) mission showcased that laser communications has the potential to outperform state of the art RF communication technologies, by providing higher data rates, lower weight requirements and lower power requirements. Unlike the highest fidelity RF technologies, free space optical communications doesn't negatively affect the design of a spacecraft and uses a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, the near-infrared. The backbone to the LLCD technology is governed by superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPDs) at the ground receiver. First introduced in 2001, SNSPDs are single photon detectors which operate in the near-infrared electromagnetic spectrum and are amongst the highest fidelity single photon detectors. SNSPDs exhibit attractive performance metrics such as, high count rates, low dark counts, high efficiency and low jitter, which have outperformed other single photon detectors. However, the readout electronics play a huge role in contributing to electrical jitter, which has a negative effect on the detector performance. Electrical jitter is noise which arises due to electronic parts. Various detectors have been engineered, from increasing the width of detectors and increasing the kinetic inductance of the detectors. Thus, the aim is to find a correlation between the latching current and kinetic inductance, as these parameters effect the performance of Molybedum Silicide (MoSi) single photon detectors. Once this correlation is understood, the next goal would be to optimize the readout electronics to eliminate the latching effect, where we hope is to study new physics.