How Few Photons Per Second Can You See

Russ Palum

M. G. Mingolla, Fabrizio Piacentini, Alessio Avella +10 more

This paper's purpose is to review the results recently obtained in the Quantum Optics labs of the National Institute of Metrological Research (INRIM) in the field of single- and few-photon detectors calibration, from both the classical and quantum viewpoint. In the first part of the paper is presented the calibration of a single-photon detector with absolute methods, while in the second part we focus on photon-number-resolving detectors, discussing both the classical and quantum characterization of such devices.

Martin Cohen

If we turn down our light source from 100 million whatever photons a second to, say, just ten a second, we see the problem, if not the screen, very clearly. These last few photons of light head off, one by one, for the screen, some of them hitting the piece of card but the odd one going through a slit. Now, according to common sense, each should be able to land on the screen unaffected by whether the other slit is there – or not.

Ł. Kapłon, N. Krawczyk, Ines Moskal

Fen Zou, Li‐Bao Fan, Jin‐Feng Huang +1 more

Few-photon optomechanical effects not only are important physical evidence for understanding the radiation-pressure interaction between photons and mechanical oscillation, but also have wide potential applications in modern quantum technology. Here we study the few-photon optomechanical effects including photon blockade and generation of the Schr\"odinger cat states under the assistance of a cross-Kerr interaction, which is an inherent interaction accompanied by the optomechanical coupling in a generalized optomechanical system. By exactly diagonalizing the generalized optomechanical Hamiltonian and calculating its unitary evolution operator, we find the physical mechanism of the enhancement of photon blockade and single-photon mechanical displacement. The quantum properties in this generalized optomechanical system are studied by investigating the second-order correlation function of the cavity field and calculating the Wigner function and the probability distribution of the rotated quadrature operator for the mechanical mode. We also study the influence of the dissipations on the few-photon optomechanical effects.