Experimental investigation of the detection mechanism in WSi nanowire superconducting single photon detectors

R Gaudio, JJ Renema, Z Zhou, VB Verma… - Applied Physics …, 2016 - pubs.aip.org
We use quantum detector tomography to investigate the detection mechanism in WSi
nanowire superconducting single photon detectors. To this purpose, we fabricated a 250 nm
wide and 250 nm long WSi nanowire and measured its response to impinging photons with
wavelengths ranging from λ= 900 nm to λ= 1650 nm. Tomographic measurements show that
the detector response depends on the total excitation energy only. Moreover, for total
absorbed energies> 0.8 eV the current–energy relation is linear, similar to what was …