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Scientific Reports

Harnessing click detectors for the genuine characterization of light states

René Heilmann, Jan Sperling, Armando Pérez-Leija, Markus Gräfe, Matthias Heinrich, Stefan Nolte, W. Vogel, Alexander Szameit

Published Jan 14, 2016• 36 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The key requirement for harnessing the quantum properties of light is the capability to detect and count individual photons. Of particular interest are photon-number-resolving detectors, which allow one to determine whether a state of light is classical or genuinely quantum. Existing schemes for addressing this challenge rely on a proportional conversion of photons to electrons. As such, they are capable of correctly characterizing small photon fluxes, yet are limited by uncertainties in the conversion rate. In this work, we employ a divide-and-conquer approach to infallibly discerning non-classicality of states of light. This is achieved by transforming the incident fields into uniform spatial distributions that readily lend themselves for characterization by standard on-off detectors. Since the exact statistics of the light stream in multiplexed on-off detectors are click statistics, our technique is freely scalable to accommodate-in principle-arbitrarily large photon fluxes. Our experiments pave the way towards genuine integrated photon-number-resolving detection for advanced on-chip photonic quantum networks.

DOI
10.1038/srep19489

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The key requirement for harnessing the quantum properties of light is the capability to detect and count individual photons. Of particular interest are photon-number-resolving detectors, which allow one to determine whether a state of light is classical or genuinely quantum. Existing schemes for addressing this challenge rely on a proportional conversion of photons to electrons. As such, they are capable of correctly characterizing small photon fluxes, yet are limited by uncertainties in the conversion rate. In this work, we employ a divide-and-conquer approach to infallibly discerning non-classicality of states of light. This is achieved by transforming the incident fields into uniform spatial distributions that readily lend themselves for characterization by standard on-off detectors. Since the exact statistics of the light stream in multiplexed on-off detectors are click statistics, our technique is freely scalable to accommodate-in principle-arbitrarily large photon fluxes. Our experiments pave the way towards genuine integrated photon-number-resolving detection for advanced on-chip photonic quantum networks.
The key requirement for harnessing the quantum properties of light is the capability to detect and count individual photons. Of particular interest are photon-number-resolving detectors, which allow one to determine whether a state of light is classical or genuinely quantum. Existing schemes for addressing this challenge rely on a proportional conversion of photons to electrons. As such, they are capable of correctly characterizing small photon fluxes, yet are limited by uncertainties in the conversion rate. In this work, we employ a divide-and-conquer approach to overcome these limitations by transforming the incident fields into uniform distributions that readily lend themselves for characterization by standard on-off detectors. Since the exact statistics of the light stream are obtained from the click statistics, our technique is freely scalable to accommodate - in principle - arbitrarily large photon fluxes. Our experiments pave the way towards genuine integrated photon-number-resolving detectors for advanced on-chip photonic quantum networks.
We report on the implementation of a time-multiplexed click detection scheme to probe quantum correlations between different spatial optical modes. We demonstrate that such measurement setups can uncover nonclassical correlations in multimode light fields even if the single mode reductions are purely classical. The nonclassical character of correlated photon pairs, generated by a parametric down-conversion, is immediately measurable employing the theory of click counting instead of low-intensity approximations with photoelectric detection models. The analysis is based on second- and higher-order moments, which are directly retrieved from the measured click statistics, for relatively high mean photon numbers. No data postprocessing is required to demonstrate the effects of interest with high significance, despite low efficiencies and experimental imperfections. Our approach shows that such novel detection schemes are a reliable and robust way to characterize quantum-correlated light fields for practical applications in quantum communications.
We introduce the direct linearity characterization of single-photon detectors and photon-number-resolving detectors. We discuss the supralinearity that goes beyond the current single-photon detection models. We also report on advanced detectors and sensors of statistical, vector, and correlation properties of light down to the single-photon level. The novel detection schemes harness complex optical networks, single-photon detector arrays, and deep learning. We present high-fidelity photon statistics estimation, resource-efficient polarization sensor, and quantum entanglement detector. We discuss the efficiency and scaling of the presented detection modalities.