Abstract
We characterized the performance of abiased superconducting nanowire to detect X-ray photons. The device, made of a 10 nm thin NbTiN film and fabricated on a dielectric substrate ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$SiO_{2}$</tex-math></inline-formula> , Nb <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{3}$</tex-math></inline-formula> O <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{5}$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) detected 1000 times larger signal than anticipated from direct X-ray absorption. We attributed this effect to X-ray induced generation of secondary particles in the substrate. The enhancement corresponds to an increase in the flux by the factor of 3.6, relative to a state-of-the-art commercial X-ray silicon drift detector. The detector exhibited 8.25 ns temporal recovery time and 82 ps timing resolution, measured using optical photons. Our results emphasize the importance of the substrate in superconducting X-ray single photon detectors.
Highlights
S UPERCONDUCTING nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have reached technological maturity for sensing optical photons that span across the electromagnetic spectrum from the visible to the near-infrared
We introduce thin-film NbTiN SNSPD to X-ray detection and quantify its performance
The measurement of the total number of X-ray photons arriving at the X-ray SNSPDs (X-SNSPD) implies the efficiency larger than unity if only direct X-ray absorption in the nanowire is considered
Summary
S UPERCONDUCTING nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) have reached technological maturity for sensing optical photons that span across the electromagnetic spectrum from the visible to the near-infrared. The state-of-the-art photon counting X-ray detectors are based on photon-to-electron conversion facilitated by a biased semiconductor [8], [9] This technology offers 10 ns timing resolution, several 100 s ns of dead times, and count rates up to a million counts per second for a single pixel [10], [11]. SNSPD technology with high timing resolution reaching the few ps level, giga counts per second (Gcps) count rate [12], and single photon sensitivity has a great potential to improve current photon counting X-ray detection schemes. Our device demonstrates a large enhancement of the total count rate per detection area, which we attribute to secondary processes generated in the substrate.
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