Information extraction in photon-counting experiments

Abstract

We demonstrate a comparison of different multiplexing architectures based on quantum detector tomography. Using the purity of their measurement outcomes, we gain insight about the photon-number resolving power of the devices. Further, we calculate the information each measurement outcome can extract out of a Hilbert space with given dimension. Our work confirms that more multiplexing outcomes enable higher photon-number resolving power; however, the splitting between those outcomes must be optimized as well.