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Optics Letters

Photon-counting statistics of pulsed light sources

Roy S. Bondurant, Prem Kumar, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, M. M. Salour

Published Nov 1, 1982• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report measurement of the photon-counting distributions of nanosecond-duration light pulses. Photon counting is performed on light sources with widely different photon statistics, such as (1) a Q-switched Nd:YAG-laserpumped dye laser operating well above threshold and producing single-mode nanosecond pulses, (2) the same laser operating close to threshold, and (3) a rotating ground-glass aberrator illuminated by the laser pulses of case (1). The method is particularly suitable for the investigation of the statistics of light generated by the nonlinear interaction of radiation with matter.

DOI
10.1364/ol.7.000529

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We report measurement of the photon-counting distributions of nanosecond-duration light pulses. Photon counting is performed on light sources with widely different photon statistics, such as (1) a Q-switched Nd:YAG-laserpumped dye laser operating well above threshold and producing single-mode nanosecond pulses, (2) the same laser operating close to threshold, and (3) a rotating ground-glass aberrator illuminated by the laser pulses of case (1). The method is particularly suitable for the investigation of the statistics of light generated by the nonlinear interaction of radiation with matter.
Faint laser pulses are practical signal sources in quantum key distribution. The photon statistics has been measured by recording every photo-counts moment and leading directly to the Mandel parameter of the photon distribution. Two different types operation of a single mode laser diode have been considered: either direct pulsing of the driving current or CW emission followed by pulse-shaping using an acousto-optic modulator. In both cases, it has been found that for practical attenuations, the photon distribution in each light pulse follows a poissonian statistics.
A source of entangled photons based on well-separated laser pump pulses (PDs) with a duration in the nanosecond range may be useful in many applications. Yet, such a source has intrinsic problems arising from the simultaneous arrival of signal and noise photons to the detectors, which makes the methods unsuitable for dealing with accidental (or spurious) coincidences applied in the continuous-wave or mode-locked pump regimes. Those problems are analyzed, and practical methods to calculate the number of accidental coincidences are described and experimentally checked. These methods are useful not only to measure entanglement, but also in every situation where extracting the number of valid two-photon coincidences from noisy data generated by such a pulsed process is required. As an original example of the use of these methods, we present the time-resolved measurement of the concurrence of the field produced by spontaneous parametric downconversion with PDs of duration in the ns range at a repetition of kHz.
Abstract A photon-counting astronomical instrument for optical observations with nanosecond time resolution is being developed to observe the statistical distribution of photons in time. The purpose of this ‘quantum-optical spectrometer’ is to measure quantum-statistical properties of the photon gas and to study the physics of radiative deexcitation. The amount of photon bunching in time contains information on parameters such as the fraction of stimulated emission and the degree of frequency redistribution that the light has undergone.
We present a detailed discussion of a recently demonstrated experimental technique capable of measuring the correlation function of a pulsed light source with picosecond time resolution. The measurement involves a streak camera in single photon counting mode, which is modified such that a signal at a fixed repetition rate, and well defined energy, can be monitored after each pulsed laser excitation. The technique provides further insight into the quantum optical properties of pulsed light emission from semiconductor nanostructures, and the dynamics inside a pulse, on the sub-nanosecond time scale.
In practice the most advanced field of quantum information science is quantum cryptography. The best known example of quantum cryptography is quantum key distribution (QKD) which offers an information-theoretically secure solution to the key exchange problem. There are QKD protocols which rely on a quantum channel that is able to transmit single photons. This can be implemented by using very low-power coherent light field, where values of bits are encoded into the polarization state of photons. Therefore, it is important to know the photon number distribution of the light source. In this paper we present the reconstruction of photon statistics for different pulsed light sources radiating at 850 nm (a common choice for free space quantum communication), using only a single on-off photon counting detector.
We present photon-counting distributions of multimode squeezed light of bandwidth B. Such light, for example, is generated by the intracavity parametric down-converter of Wu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 57, 2520 (1986)], which has now become a standard source for generating highly squeezed light. By expanding the electric-field operator into relevant modes over the counting interval T and applying the Bogoliubov transformation that generates squeezing, we calculate the photon-counting distributions under both BT\ensuremath{\gg}1 and BT\ensuremath{\ll}1 conditions. We find that the probability for counting an odd number of photons is identically zero under the former condition, whereas the latter is equivalent to having a photodetector with quantum efficiency that is much less than unity.