Superconducting Detector Measures Single Photons
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Nov. 5, 2013 — A new superconducting detector array that can measure the energy of individual photons is seen as a likely successor to CCDs and other semiconductor-based detectors for the visible and near-infrared regions, which are starting to hit performance limits. "What we have made is essentially a hyperspectral video camera with no intrinsic noise," said Ben Mazin, assistant professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara, of the array that he and his team developed. "On a pixel-per-pixel basis,...