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Eighth Symposium on Novel Photoelectronic Detection Technology and Applications

Experimental study on single photon heterodyne detection performance

Hongzhou Dong, Mingwu Ao, Xianming Yang, Yong Liu

Published Mar 12, 2021• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

By constructing an experimental system, the heterodyne detection of the photon counting system is realized. The effects of photon counting rate, sampling rate, background light noise and beam mismatching angle on the single-photon heterodyne detection performance based on power spectrum averaging are studied experimentally. The results show that the power spectrum average results have a saturated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a certain count rate, and the saturation SNR increases with the increase of the count rate. As the sampling rate increases, a higher saturation SNR can be obtained. The local oscillator and signal light mismatch angles have the same effect on single photon heterodyne detection compared to linear detection. The research results in this paper have a promoting significance for the practical application of single-photon heterodyne detection technology.

DOI
10.1117/12.2586056

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Recent active development of quantum computers and quantum key distribution systems requires characterization of the parameters of single-photon detectors. A key parameter of single-photon detectors is detection efficiency. One of the methods for measuring the detection efficiency given in the international ETSI standard is the Klyshko reference-free method based on the use of the effect of spontaneous parametric downconversion. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of this method depends on a combination of the pump wavelength, the nonlinear crystal axis angle, and the type of detector sensitive element. When the combination is complex, one has to deal with low SNR. In this case, to obtain a high SNR, long-term signal accumulation is necessary. In real detectors, the situation is complicated by the presence of a high noise level at low frequencies. The heterodyning-based method we have proposed consists in introducing modulation into the standard Klyshko scheme and accumulating the signal at a higher frequency. The method was numerically modeled and experimentally tested. A 14 times improvement in SNR was demonstrated compared to simple signal accumulation.
Photon counting has been widely used in weak light even to single photon detection.However,the Shot noise of photon-counting N for Poisson statistics seriously affects the sensitivity.A method using wavelength modulation spectroscopy technique to improve signal-to-noise ratio of photon-counting is presented.The light from an external cavity diode laser is wavelength modulated and then chopped to a series of laser pulses by using a acoustic-optical modulator,the counts of fluorescence photon are recorded and then converted to an analog signal.The analog signal is added to a lock-in amplifier for harmonic demodulation using lock-in method.The fluorescence spectrum is the 6S_1/2(F=4)→6P_3/2 transition of Cs D_2 line and the detected probability of photon is 35%.The experimental demonstration has achieved a 51 dB signal-to-noise improvement factor in 2f harmonic detection.The minimum detectable count here is 3×10-4 with the residual noise 7.54 μV.The results show a potential application in fluorescence detection of cold molecules or single molecule.