High-efficiency and fast photon-number resolving parallel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector

Abstract: Photon-number resolving (PNR) single-photon detectors are an enabling technology in many areas such as photonic quantum computing, non-classical light source characterisation and quantum imaging. Here, we demonstrate high-efficiency PNR detectors using a parallel superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (P-SNSPD) architecture that does not suffer from crosstalk between the pixels and that is free of latching. The behavior of the detector is modelled and used to predict the possible outcomes given a certain number of incoming photons. We apply our model to a 4-pixel P-SNSPD with a system detection efficiency of 92.5%. We also demonstrate how this detector allows reconstructing the photon-number statistics of a coherent source of light, which paves the way towards the characterisation of the photon statistics of other types of light source using a single detector.