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Journal of Electronic Science and Technology

Direct Measurement of Non-Classical Photon Statistics with a Multi-Pixel Photon Counter

Chengjie Ding, Youying Rong, Yu Chen, Xiu-Liang Chen, E Wu

Published Sep 1, 2019• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Photon number resolving detectors with high accuracy bring broad applications in long-distance laser ranging, ultrafast spectroscopy, and quantum optics. In this paper, we observed the non-classical photon number distribution directly with a multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC) instead of a classic Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) system. The detector’s photon-number resolving ability was characterized by quantum detector tomography. To show the quantum feature of the detector, we further plotted the Wigner function, which was obtained corresponding to the positive operator value measure (POVM) elements. Finally, we declared the observation of non-classical photon statistics from a single color center in nanodiamond by using this detector.

DOI
10.11989/jest.1674-862x.90704101

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Photon number resolving detectors with high accuracy bring broad applications in long-distance laser ranging, ultrafast spectroscopy, and quantum optics. In this paper, we observed the non-classical photon number distribution directly with a multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC) instead of a classic Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) system. The detector’s photon-number resolving ability was characterized by quantum detector tomography. To show the quantum feature of the detector, we further plotted the Wigner function, which was obtained corresponding to the positive operator value measure (POVM) elements. Finally, we declared the observation of non-classical photon statistics from a single color center in nanodiamond by using this detector.
In this paper, we reconstructed the positive operator-valued measure (POVM) of a photon-number-resolving detector (PNRD) based on a multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC) by means of quantum detector tomography (QDT) at 791 nm and 523 nm, respectively. MPPC is a kind of spatial-multiplexing PNRD with a silicon avalanche photodiode (Si-APD) array as the photon receiver. Experimentally, the quantum characteristics of MPPC were calibrated at 2 MHz at two different wavelengths. The POVM elements were given by QDT. The fidelity of the reconstructed POVM elements is higher than 99.96%, which testifies that the QDT is reliable to calibrate MPPC at different wavelengths. With QDT and associated Wigner functions, the quantum properties of MPPC can be calibrated more directly and accurately in contrast with those conventional methods of modeling detectors.
In recent years, quantum detector tomography (QDT) is widely used in many fields, such as non-Gaussian states preparation, quantum metrology, quantum communication and so forth. In this paper, we used QDT to completely characterize a photon-number-resolving detector (PNRD) based on a multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC) at 650 nm, which operated in continuous wave (CW) mode. Reconstructing the positive operator-valued measure (POVM) accurately by QDT could help us theoretically derived the operation performance of MPPC in quantum sensing with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center ensemble. The reconstruction fidelity of MPPC is larger than 99.94%, which means that QDT is very reliable. Comparing with conventional silicon avalanche photodiode (Si-APD), the fluorescent contrast of optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) spectrum of NV center ensemble detected by MPPC could be significantly improved. Since its excellent linearity and outstanding photon-number-resolving capability, MPPC could be further used in the DC magnetometry of NV center ensemble. We can infer that the magnetic field sensitivity can be effectively improved by replacing Si-APD with MPPC. Reportedly, this is an extremely rare research on the application of MPPC in NV center magnetometry.
Photon counting is a cornerstone of quantum optics. Here, we demonstrate precisely counting from 0 to over 9000 photons, beating the Poisson noise limit by at least 4.1 dB4.1~\mathrm{dB}4.1 dB across this range. We achieve sub-single-photon precision up to 276 photons per pulse. To do so, we multiplex eight intrinsically photon-number-resolving superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors across 128 temporal modes. We use a model-informed characterization of each of the 1024 detection bins, for optimal precision. We perform quantum detector tomography to reconstruct the positive operator valued measures (POVMs) of the complete device, which consists of 1.38⋅1081.38\cdot10^81.38⋅108 matrix elements. At the repetition rate of our experiment of 80 kHz80~\mathrm{kHz}80 kHz, we can precisely count photons corresponding to an optical power of approximately 71 pW71~\mathrm{pW}71 pW, bridging the gap from single-photon measurements to high-sensitivity optical power meters. A photon-number-resolving detector of this size, and the tools used to analyze it, will become increasingly important to characterize large quantum states, as well as tasks in precision metrology and optical power standards.
In quantum optics and its applications, there is an urgent demand for photon-number resolving detectors. Recently, there appeared multi-pixel counters (MPPC) that are able to distinguish between 1,2,..10 photons. At the same time, strong coupling between different pixels (crosstalk) hinders their photon-number resolution. In this work, we suggest a method for `filtering out' the crosstalk effect in the measurement of intensity correlation functions. The developed approach can be expanded to the analysis of higher-order intensity correlations by using just a single MPPC.
We investigate the use of a photon-number resolving (PNR) detector as an alternative method for measuring the second-order correlation function g2(0). Our implementation employs four spatially multiplexed single-photon detectors to reconstruct the photon number distribution P(n) from click statistics. We estimate g2(0) for both coherent and quantum dot excition emission, and compare the results to those obtained from a conventional Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) setup. In the single-mode regime, we observe close agreement between both approaches. We additionally compare the acquisition times required for each method and find that PNR-based measurements enable faster estimation of g2(0), offering potential advantages for scalable characterisation of quantum light sources.