ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,317,758, issued on May 27, was assigned to Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.).

"SNSPD with integrated aluminum nitride seed or waveguide layer" was invented by Zihao Yang (Santa Clara, Calif.), Mingwei Zhu (San Jose, Calif.), Nag B. Patibandla (Pleasanton, Calif.), Nir Yahav (Sunnyvale, Calif.), Robert Jan Visser (Menlo Park, Calif.) and Adi de la Zerda (Los Altos, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) device includes a substrate having a top surface, an optical waveguide on the top surface of the substrate to receive light propagating substantially parallel to the top s...