The process of cavity mode quantum state photodetection subject to a nonideal measurement device is under consideration. A set of nonorthogonal probabilistic operator valued measures (POVMs) describing the photodetection process is suggested. The superoperators of conditional system evolution and their Kraus representations are obtained. Developed formalism is used to the quantum state reconstruction problem. We recalculate the probabilities of hypotheses about the initial state of cavity quantum mode in the case of unknown superposition of vacuum and single photon states.
Triggered single-photon sources produce the vacuum state with nonzero probability, but produce a much smaller multiphoton component. It is therefore reasonable to approximate the output of these photon sources as a mixture of the vacuum and single-photon states with probabilities $1\ensuremath{-}p$ and
p, respectively. Here we are concerned with increasing the efficiency
p by directing multiple copies of the single-photon-vacuum mixture into a linear optical device and applying photodetection on some outputs. We prove that it is impossible, under certain conditions, to increase
p via linear optics and conditional preparation based on photodetection. We also establish a class of photodetection events for which
p can be improved, although with an added multiphoton component. In addition we prove that it is not possible to obtain perfect single-photon states via this method from imperfect
(p<1) inputs.
Quantum trajectories describe the stochastic evolution of an open quantum system conditioned on continuous monitoring of its output, such as by an ideal photodetector. In practice an experimenter has access to an output filtered through various electronic devices, rather than the microscopic states of the detector. This introduces several imperfections into the measurement process, of which only inefficiency has previously been incorporated into quantum trajectory theory. However, all electronic devices have finite bandwidths, and the consequent delay in conveying the output signal to the observer implies that the evolution of the conditional state of the quantum system must be non-Markovian. We present a general method of describing this evolution and apply it to avalanche photodiodes and to photoreceivers. We include the effects of efficiency, dead time, bandwidth, electronic noise and dark counts. The essential idea is to treat the quantum system and classical detector jointly, and to average over the latter to obtain the conditional quantum state. The significance of our theory is that quantum trajectories for realistic detection are necessary for sophisticated approaches to quantum feedback, and our approach could be applied in many areas of physics.