Measuring nonclassicality with silicon photomultipliers

Abstract

Detector stochastic deviations from an ideal response can hamper the measurement of quantum properties of light especially in the mesoscopic regime where photon-number resolution is required. We demonstrate that, by a proper analysis of the output signal, nonclassicality of twin-beam states can be detected and exploited with commercial and cost effective silicon-based photon-number-resolving detectors.PACS numbers:

Exploiting Silicon photomultipliers for measuring nonclassical optical states

“…In particular, the cleanest information on the detected light is contained in the peak of the electronic output signal. That is why, in the following we show the experimental results achieved by integrating the signal over 10 ns, which represents the minimum value compatible with the measurement stability [18]. Under this condition, both the dark counts and the cross-talk effect can be considered negligible.…”

“…In our previous works [18,23], we have shown that, for what concerns the last generation of SiPMs, the cross-talk probability has been consistently reduced and the afterpulses has been made negligible. Thanks to these improvements, we have recently demonstrated that SiPMs can be used to reveal the nonclassicality of mesoscopic twin-beam states of light and to produce subPoissonian states by means of conditional measurements [18,19]. In Sect.2 we briefly introduce the model describing the light detection with SiPMs.…”

“…Finally, the geometric imperfections of the device struc- * e-mail: gchesi@uninsubria.it * * e-mail: alessia.allevi@uninsubria.it * * * e-mail: maria.bondani@uninsubria.it ture can capture photoelectrons that, when released, start new avalanches, called afterpulses.. In our previous works [18,23], we have shown that, for what concerns the last generation of SiPMs, the cross-talk probability has been consistently reduced and the afterpulses has been made negligible. Thanks to these improvements, we have recently demonstrated that SiPMs can be used to reveal the nonclassicality of mesoscopic twin-beam states of light and to produce subPoissonian states by means of conditional measurements [18,19].…”

Quantum tomography of light states by photon-number-resolving detectors

“…We assume the same value of LO adopted above, i.e. b = 20 , but now we set η = 0.4, a realistic value for many kinds of photon-numberresolving detectors [25,49,50]. In figure 4(c), we show the modulus of the reconstructed density matrix for the Fock state ñ |1 , whereas in figure 4(d) the corresponding photon-number statistics.…”

Photon-number parity of heralded single photons from a Bragg-reflection waveguide reconstructed loss-tolerantly via moment generating function

“…Due to the experimental imperfections, like the optical losses both in the state manipulation and target state detection, the measured photon statistics are often degraded and the fragile quantum features are lost [14,15]. In order to decouple the effect of these two loss contributions one can investigate the target state properties with the help of the normalized factorial moments of the photon number that can be extracted independent of the detection losses.…”