Recently, the superconducting transition edge sensor has attracted a great deal of attention as a technology capable of detecting a single photon ideally. This detector is capable of measuring the energy and wavelength of each photon and has the sensitivity in a wide wavelength range from visible to near infrared and the quantum limit characteristic in which the dark count rate is almost zero. Therefore, it is expected to be applied to the fields of quantum optics requiring control of single photons, or bio-imaging based on fluorescence or bioluminescence at photon-starved region. In this paper, we introduce the outline of this photon detection techniques, and show the current situation of the detector developed by AIST or other research institutes.
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