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arXiv:2512.17336 · Physical Review Research

Validating the calibrated creation of heralded single photons

Daniel Borrero Landazabal, Kaisa Laiho

quant-phSubmitted Dec 19, 2025• Announced Dec 22, 2025• 0 citations
v1 · Dec 19, 2025v2 · Jul 15, 2026
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Abstract

Coincidence-count discrimination have turned utterly practical in the characterization of photon-pair processes and heralded single photons. Here, we implement a heralded single photon source based on parametric down-conversion (PDC) in a PP-KTP waveguide in the telecom wavelength range involving a low number of optical modes. We extend the toolbox for the loss-tolerant state characterization by combining conventional figures-of-merit in order to access the heralded state's mean photon number and its photon-number parity. Our experiment demonstrates that an accurate determination of these characteristics is possible just through simple photon-correlation measurements. We believe that our results can find usage in the calibrated creation of heralded single photons and in determining the expectation values of observables that are crucial for denoting a single quantum.

Journal reference
Phys. Rev. Research, 22 July 2026
DOI
10.1103/k9q5-n4wn
Comments
5 pages, 5 figures

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Coincidence-count discrimination have turned utterly practical in the characterization of photon-pair processes and heralded single photons. Here, we implement a heralded single photon source based on parametric down-conversion (PDC) in a PP-KTP waveguide in the telecom wavelength range involving a low number of optical modes. We extend the toolbox for the loss-tolerant state characterization by combining conventional figures-of-merit in order to access the heralded state's mean photon number and its photon-number parity. Our experiment demonstrates that an accurate determination of these characteristics is possible just through simple photon-correlation measurements. We believe that our results can find usage in the calibrated creation of heralded single photons and in determining the expectation values of observables that are crucial for denoting a single quantum.
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Abstract Due to their strict photon-number correlation, the twin beams produced in parametric down-conversion (PDC) work well for heralded state generation. Often, however, this state manipulation is distorted by the optical losses in the herald and by the higher photon-number contributions inevitable in the PDC process. In order to find feasible figures of merit for characterizing the heralded states, we investigate their normalized factorial moments of the photon number that can be accessed regardless of the optical losses in the detection. We then perform a measurement of the joint photon statistics of twin beams from a semiconductor Bragg-reflection waveguide with transition-edge sensors acting as photon-number-resolving detectors. We extract the photon-number parity of heralded single photons in a loss-tolerant fashion by utilizing the moment generating function. The photon-number parity is highly practicable in quantum state characterization, since it takes into account the complete photon-number content of the target state.
We report on the experimental realization and characterization of an asynchronous heralded single-photon source based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Photons at 1550 nm are heralded as being inside a single-mode fibre with more than 60% probability, and the multi-photon emission probability is reduced by a factor of up to more than 500 compared to Poissonian light sources. These figures of merit, together with the choice of telecom wavelength for the heralded photons, are compatible with practical applications needing very efficient and robust single-photon sources.
We report on a guided wave asynchronous heralded photon source based on the creation of non-degenerate photon pairs by spontaneous parametric down conversion in a Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate waveguide. We show that using the signal photon at 1310\nm as a trigger, a gated detection process permits announcing the arrival of single photons at 1550nm at the output of a single mode optical fiber with a high probability of 0.37. At the same time the multi-photon emission probability is reduced by a factor of 10 compared to poissonian light sources.
We report on a guided wave heralded photon source based on the creation of non-degenerate photon pairs by spontaneous parametric down conversion in a Periodically Poled Lithium Niobate waveguide. Using the signal photon at 1310 nm as a trigger, a gated detection process permits announcing the arrival of single photons at 1550 nm at the output of a single mode optical fiber with the best probability to date of 0.38. The multi-photon emission probability is reduced by a factor of 10 compared to poissonian light sources. Relying on guided wave technologies such as integrated optics and fiber optics components, our source offers stability, compactness and efficiency and can serve as a paradigm for guided wave devices applied to quantum communication and computation using existing telecom networks.
We explore the feasibility of using high conversion-efficiency periodically-poled crystals to produce photon pairs for photon-counting detector calibrations at 1550 nm. The goal is the development of an appropriate parametric down-conversion (PDC) source at telecom wavelengths meeting the requirements of high-efficiency pair production and collection in single spectral and spatial modes (single-mode fibres). We propose a protocol to optimize the photon collection, noise levels and the uncertainty evaluation. This study ties together the results of our efforts to model the single-mode heralding efficiency of a two-photon PDC source and to estimate the heralding uncertainty of such a source.