A new type of detectors recently brought to market is based on superconducting nanowires. Superconducting nanowire single photon detectors made by Single Quantum BV were developed and optimized for telecom wavelengths and used in HANAS experiments to assess possible further improvement of our quantum memory. These detectors already offered a very important advantage over the well known semiconducting devices that are widely used in research labs as well as in industrial applications in spite of the fact that they were intended for other applications at telecom wavelengths. We have already demonstrated that these detectors compete with well established semiconductor based detectors and are able to reach detection efficiencies approaching unity.
In this project a fully optimized prototype for operation at crucial atomic frequencies such as 795 nm where the D2 transition in Rubidium has already allowed numerous key experiments such as Bose Einstein condensation, high sensitivity gravimeters and atomic memories operating at the single photon level has been developed, benchmarked and brought to market by Single Quantum.
In Deliverable 1.1 the fabrication and assembly of the prototype has been described, fully optimized for the application described in this proposal.
In Deliverable 1.2 the testing and benchmarking has been described, showing that the prototype completely outperforms state of the art detectors by several orders of magnitude.
Deliverable 2.1 describes how the prototype can be brought to market and finally deliverable 2.2 describes the promising business case relating to these developments.
During our market study a lot of customers showed real interest in our product. Demonstration have been performed at members of the HANAS consortium. In addition we exhibited the prototype at more than 10 conferences and this also lead to >10 demonstrations. Finally, only 6 months of dissemination of this fully optimized product for atomic applications (i.e. a wavelength of 795 nm) has lead to 5 product sales:
1. University of Hannover, Germany;
2. National University of Singapore, Singapore;
3. University of Ottawa, Canada;
4. University of Sydney, Australia;
5. Universität Palacky, Czech Republic
The cumulative worth of these orders is 520,000 Euro.
