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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Experimental Characterization of Optical Detectors for Single Photon Subtraction

Virginia D’Auria, Noriyuki Lee, Taoufik Amri, Julien Laurat, Claude Fabre

Published Jan 1, 2010• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum detector tomography enables to reconstruct POVMs associated with a measurement apparatus. For two detectors, an APD and a TMD, we study the evolution of their projectivity under the effect of background noise and quantum efficiencies.
DOI
10.1364/qels.2010.qthd6

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Measurement is the only part of a general quantum system that has yet to be characterised experimentally in a complete manner. Detector tomography provides a procedure for doing just this; an arbitrary measurement device can be fully characterised, and thus calibrated, in a systematic way without access to its components or its design. The result is a reconstructed POVM containing the measurement operators associated with each measurement outcome. We consider two detectors, a single-photon detector and a photon-number counter, and propose an easily realised experimental apparatus to perform detector tomography on them. We also present a method of visualising the resulting measurement operators.
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