NIST Widens Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors to 0.1 Millimeter and Cuts Dark Counts by Ten Orders of Magnitude, Published in Optica on August 19, 2026 Under DARPA's SynQuaNon Program

A NIST team led by Kristen Parzuchowski and Adam McCaughan placed current-carrying niobium rails beside a tungsten silicide strip and ran superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors up to 0.1 millimeter wide at their intrinsic limit, cutting the dark count rate by ten orders of magnitude and reaching near-unity efficiency at 4 micrometers on a device 20 times wider than before. We read why a wide, quiet, polarization-blind photon counter matters for single-photon lidar, free-space laser links and low-light imaging, who gains, and what separates a sub-kelvin bench result from a receiver a program office can buy.