IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AEROSPACE AND ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS
Abstract
Communications from deep space need to overcome two major issues: the strong attenuation due to the large distances and the limited power available at the transmitter. A class of sensors that looks promising for deep space communications is provided by the superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors that are characterized by very small jitter (few tens of ps), fast rise (hundreds of ps) and comparatively slow decay (few ns). Although it could seem that the bottleneck is represented by the long reset time, in this paper we present a scheme whose effective rate is limited by the jitter and that is able to transmit, with a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector with a ratio between decay time and jitter equal to 170 (a typical value), almost 6 times faster than the rate that the decay time would allow.
