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International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks

Reconstruction of photon number distributions from single photon events

A. Porzio, Pasquale Ercolano, Diego Scarano, Ciro Bruscino, Martina Peluso, Daniela Salvoni, Mikkel Ejrnaes, Chengjun Zhang, Hao Li, Lixing You, Jian Ping Huang, L. Parlato, Giovanni Piero Pepe

Published Jul 6, 2025• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

In quantum communication and quantum optics, a photon-number-resolving detector is a very useful device. It can measure, in-line with the experiment, the mean number of photons and real-time controlling photon distributions. In this contribution, we tested the reliability of a superconducting nanostrip photon-number-resolving detector with eight pixels to reconstruct, from the measured events, the statistical distribution of photons emitted by light sources with high repetition rate.

DOI
10.1109/icton67126.2025.11125179

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In quantum communication and quantum optics, a photon-number-resolving detector is a very useful device. It can measure, in-line with the experiment, the mean number of photons and real-time controlling photon distributions. In this contribution, we tested the reliability of a superconducting nanostrip photon-number-resolving detector with eight pixels to reconstruct, from the measured events, the statistical distribution of photons emitted by light sources with high repetition rate.
Single photon detectors based on superconducting nanostrips demonstrated high performance at 1550 nm, combining high efficiency and low noise. Arranged in arrays, these devices can implement photon-number resolution, expanding the range of applicability of superconducting detectors. A detector of this kind was used in our recent work to implement the annihilation operator and the characterization of quantum states in terms of their photon number distribution. The reconstructed distributions were consistent with the theoretical predictions, exhibiting fidelities higher than 99.9%. In this work, this procedure was repeated with each pixel singularly to define a detector fidelity matrix, evaluating the fidelity among all the possible pixel combinations. In this way, we introduce an additional tool that quantifies not only the quality of the reconstructed photon number distribution when compared to the theoretical expectation, but also the mutual fidelity when different pixels are chosen as independent, and then the fabrication uniformity.
Detectors capable of resolving the number of photons are essential in many applications, ranging from classic photonics to quantum optics and quantum communication. In particular, photon-number-resolving detectors based on arrays of superconducting nanostrips can offer a high detection efficiency, a low dark count rate and a recovery time of a few nanoseconds. In this work, we use a detector of this kind for the unbiased generation of random numbers by following two different methods based on the detection of photons. In the former, we exploit the property that the light is equally distributed on each strip of the entire detector, whereas in the latter we exploit the fact that, for a high average number of photons, the parity of the Poissonian distribution of the number of photons emitted by the laser tends to be zero. In addition, since these two methods are independent, it is possible to use them at the same time.
Superconducting nanostrip photon detectors have been used as single-photon detectors, which can discriminate only photons' presence or absence. It has recently been found that they can discriminate the number of photons by analyzing the output signal waveform, and they are expected to be used in various fields, especially in optical-quantum-information processing. Here, we improve the photon-number-resolving performance for light with a high-average photon number by pattern matching of the output signal waveform. Furthermore, we estimate the positive-operator-valued measure of the detector by a quantum detector tomography. The result shows that the device has photon-number-resolving performance up to five photons without any multiplexing or arraying, indicating that it is useful as a photon-number-resolving detector.
A superconducting photon number resolving detector can distinguish between different numbers of incoming photons. This makes it useful for many applications, such as boson sampling, quantum optics and communication. In particular, in this work we focused on the characterization of non-pulsed photon sources at the telecom wavelength 1550 nm by means of a superconducting device. We measured the response matrix of the detector and we reconstructed the Poissonian distribution of the number of photons emitted by a continuous wave laser light source.
A photon number resolving detector (PNRD) is a device providing a different output depending on the number of incident photons in the single or few photons regime. This tool is crucial in several applications such as quantum communication, boson sampling, photon sources characterization and so on. PNRD are not new players in ultraviolet or visible wavelengths, but superconducting nanostrips provide a performing counterpart also in the near-infrared, where the aforementioned applications would like to operate. In this work we present a comprehensive description of the operation of an eight-pixel PNRD at the telecom wavelength of 1550 nm.
Photon number resolving detectors find space in many fields, such as quantum optics, boson sampling and fluorescence spectroscopy. In particular, the reconstruction of the input photon distribution is essential in quantum communications to detect photon-number-splitting attacks. In this work, we discuss the operation configurations of a photon number resolving detector based on superconducting nanostrips at a wavelength of 1550 nm from a temporal point of view. We set a time binning and acquired the number of recorded pulses per bin by means of a time-to-digital converter. We studied the predictions of two theoretical models and compared them to the experimental data in order to analyse their operation regimes depending on the binwidth and to employ them for the reconstruction of the input photon distribution. We applied this method to a continuous-wave laser source, showing that the former can be used for the characterization of non-pulsed light sources, even with a photon emission rate so low that the dark count rate of a superconducting nanostrip is not negligible.