Quantum witness of high-speed low-noise single-photon detection

We demonstrate high-speed and low-noise near-infrared single-photon detection by using a capacitance balancing circuit to achieve a high spike noise suppression for an InGaAs/InP avalanche photodiode. The single-photon detector could operate at a tunable gate repetition rate from 10 to 60 MHz. A peak detection efficiency of 34% has been achieved with a dark count rate of 9 × 10⁻³ per gate when the detection window was set to 1 ns. Additionally, quantum detector tomography has also been performed at 60 MHz of repetition rate and for the detection window of 1 ns, enabling to witness the quantum features of the detector with the help of a negative Wigner function. By varying the bias voltage of the detector, we further demonstrated a transition from the full-quantum to semi-classical regime.