Room-Temperature Single-Photon Detector Based on Single Nanowire

Single-photon detectors that can resolve photon number play a key role in advanced quantum information technologies. Despite significant progress in improving conventional photon-counting detectors and developing novel device concepts, single-photon detectors that are capable of distinguishing incident photon number at room temperature are still very limited. We demonstrate a room-temperature photon-number-resolving detector by integrating a field-effect transistor configuration with core/shell-like nanowires. The shell serves as a photosensitive gate, shielding negative back-gated voltage, and leads to a persistent photocurrent. At room temperature, our detector is demonstrated to identify 1, 2, and 3 photon-number states with a confidence of >82%. The detection efficiency is determined to be 23%, and the dark count rate is 1.87 × 10–3 Hz. Importantly, benefiting from the anisotropic nature of 1D nanowires, the detector shows an intrinsic photon-polarization selection, which distinguishes itself from existing intensity single-photon detectors. The unique performance for the single-photon detectors based on single nanowire demonstrates the great potential for future single-photon detection applications.