arXiv:quant-ph/0409055 · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Experimental realization of a measurement conditional unitary operation at single photon level and application to detector characterization
Marco Genovese, G. Brida, Maria V. Chekhova, Marco Gramegna, Leonid A. Krivitsky, Sergej Kulik, Maria Luisa Rastello
Abstract
Our last experimental results on the realization of a measurement-conditional unitary operation at single photon level are presented. This gate operates by rotating by 90° the polarization of a photon produced by means of Type-II Parametric Down Conversion conditional to a polarization measurement on the correlated photon. We then propose a new scheme for measuring the quantum efficiency of a single photon detection apparatus by using this set-up. We present experimental results obtained with this scheme compared with traditional biphoton calibration. Our results show the interesting potentiality of the suggested scheme.