Number-Resolved Single-Photon Detection with Ultralow Noise van der Waals Hybrid.

Roy, Kallol; Ahmed, Tanweer; Dubey, Harshit; Sai, T Phanindra; Kashid, Ranjit; Maliakal, Shruti; Hsieh, Kimberly; Shamim, Saquib et al. · Adv Mater · 2018

basic_science · Level V

Where this comes from

Abstract

Van der Waals hybrids of graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides exhibit an extremely large response to optical excitation, yet counting of photons with single-photon resolution is not achieved. Here, a dual-gated bilayer graphene (BLG) and molybdenum disulphide (MoS<sub>2</sub> ) hybrid are demonstrated, where opening a band gap in the BLG allows extremely low channel (receiver) noise and large optical gain (≈10<sup>10</sup> ) simultaneously. The resulting device is capable of unambiguous determination of the Poissonian emission statistics of an optical source with single-photon resolution at an operating temperature of 80 K, dark count rate 0.07 Hz, and linear dynamic range of ≈40 dB. Single-shot number-resolved single-photon detection with van der Waals heterostructures may impact multiple technologies, including the linear optical quantum computation.