781 Mbit/s photon-counting optical communications using a superconducting nanowire detector.
We demonstrate 1550 nm photon-counting optical communications with a NbN-nanowire superconducting single-photon detector. Source data are encoded with a rate-1/2 forward-error correcting code and transmitted by use of 32-ary pulse-position modulation at 5 and 10 GHz slot rates. Error-free performance is obtained with -0.5 detected photon per source bit at a source data rate of 781 Mbits/s. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported data rate for a photon-counting receiver.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, Massachusetts 02420, USA. brobinson@ll.mit.edu
Bryan S
BS
Robinson
Andrew J
AJ
Kerman
Eric A
EA
Dauler
Richard J
RJ
Barron
David O
DO
Caplan
Mark L
ML
Stevens
John J
JJ
Carney
Scott A
SA
Hamilton
Joel K W
JK
Yang
Karl K
KK
Berggren