The result is nearly three times the current detector efficiency of 20 percent.

The detector may allow for super-fast broadband communications over interplanetary distances, allowing the transmission of large amounts of data from space in real time. The work may ultimately permit the transmission of color video between astronauts or equipment in outer space and scientists on Earth.

"It can take hours with the existing wireless radio frequency technology to get useful scientific information back from Mars to Earth. But an optical link can do that thousands of times faster," said Karl Berggren, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Current optical systems require a large laser and a lot of power to send data at high rates. Single-photon detectors made by MIT and elsewhere have not been both speedy and efficient at detecting light. Berggren and his colleagues improved the efficiency by adding a "photon trap" to the detector as well as an antireflection coating to keep light from bouncing off its surface.

The photon trap is an optical cavity consisting of the nanowire detector, a carefully measured gap of glass and a mirror. The nanowire is coiled tightly to broaden its area of overlap with the laser light.

The wire is then cooled to just above absolute zero, the point at which it becomes a superconductor and is able to detect the absorbed photons. If a photon is not absorbed the first time it touches the wire, it bounces back and forth between the coiled nanowire and the mirror so it has more opportunities to be absorbed. The more photons absorbed, the greater the efficiency of the detector.

The detector also could be applied to quantum cryptography and biomedical imaging, the researchers said.

Berggren, who is also affiliated with the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), developed the detector with colleagues from the RLE, Lincoln Laboratory and Moscow State Pedagogical University. They first disclosed their discovery in the January 23 issue of Optics Express.

The researchers are currently working to make the detector more efficient.