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Astronomy

Super photon counters

Nature volume 401, pages 654–655 (1999)Cite this article

The perfect photon detector would measure the arrival time, the energy, the polarization and the position of every arriving quantum of light, but that is easier said than done. Two groups have now succeeded in measuring everything but the polarization emitted by the Crab nebula pulsar, as reported in The Astrophysical Journal by Romani et al.1 and in Astronomy and Astrophysics by Perryman et al.2. Both groups use superconducting detectors to achieve the necessary speed and sensitivity. Making better detectors is far cheaper than building bigger telescopes and for many astronomers having access to the latest electronic detector is the key to progress.

Three years ago, Peacock et al. reported3,4 that they had detected single optical photons with a superconducting tunnel junction (STJ). A tunnel junction consists of two conductors separated by a tiny gap of insulating material or even a vacuum. If the gap is thin enough, electrons can tunnel across anyway, and if the conductors are superconductors, the junction displays very useful quantum-mechanical properties and electrical nonlinearities. An arriving photon breaks apart the pairs of electrons responsible for the superconducting state, which can then be collected. The main advantages of STJs is that they operate at high speed at very low temperatures, dissipate very little power and are very small.

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Figure 1: How to catch photons from a spinning pulsar.

References

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  1. the Infrared Astrophysics Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, 20771, Maryland, USA

    John C. Mather

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  1. John C. Mather
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Correspondence to John C. Mather.

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Mather, J. Super photon counters. Nature 401, 654–655 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/44301

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