A brief review on the recent progress of superconducting nanowire single photon detectors

Superconducting nanowire single photon detectors (SNSPD) have become the most competent photon-counting devices in wide range of wavelengths. Especially in the communication wavelength (infrared), SNSPD has shown unbeatable superior performance compared to the state-of-art semiconductor single photon detectors. The technology has matured enough for the last decade so that several commercial systems are now almost ready for routine use in general optics experiments. Here we summarize briefly the recent progress in this research field, and hope to motivate further research on the improvement of the device and the system. We cover the basic key concepts, device and system performances, remaining issues and possible further research directions of SNSPD.