High performance of gated-mode single-photon detector at 1.55 μm

High performances of single-photon detection at 1.55 μm were achieved by operating InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiodes in the gated mode at the optimized temperature. As short pulses used in the gated-mode detection produce strong spikes, a transformer-based method was invented to cancel the spikes, which makes it possible to reduce the dark counts by using short-gate pulse durations, and to discriminate the avalanche signals at low thresholds. The spike-cancellation single-photon detection at the optimized temperature produced a detection efficiency of 20% with a dark-count probability of 3.4 × 10⁻⁷ per pulse. With such a single-photon detector, a stable single-photon routing was realized in 155 km optical fibers with the average photon number 〈n〉 = 0.1 per pulse, exhibiting a fringe contrast of 87%.