Abstract
In this paper, we reconstructed the positive operator-valued measure (POVM) of a photon-number-resolving detector (PNRD) based on a multi-pixel photon counter (MPPC) by means of quantum detector tomography (QDT) at 791 nm and 523 nm, respectively. MPPC is a kind of spatial-multiplexing PNRD with a silicon avalanche photodiode (Si-APD) array as the photon receiver. Experimentally, the quantum characteristics of MPPC were calibrated at 2 MHz at two different wavelengths. The POVM elements were given by QDT. The fidelity of the reconstructed POVM elements is higher than 99.96%, which testifies that the QDT is reliable to calibrate MPPC at different wavelengths. With QDT and associated Wigner functions, the quantum properties of MPPC can be calibrated more directly and accurately in contrast with those conventional methods of modeling detectors.
Highlights
IntroductionAccurate representation of multi-photon states is one of the key tasks of modern quantum optics [1]
Accurate representation of multi-photon states is one of the key tasks of modern quantum optics [1].To represent multi-photon states, photon-number-resolving detectors (PNRDs) are widely applied in many fields [2], including the demonstration of basic principles of quantum mechanics [3], quantum computation with linear optical components [4], quantum key distribution (QKD) [5], quantum random number generation [6,7] and so forth
PNRDs play an important role in the field of biology and medicine, such as fluorescence detection [13,14], pollutant monitoring [15], flow cytometry [16], positron emission computed tomography (PET) [17,18,19]
Summary
Accurate representation of multi-photon states is one of the key tasks of modern quantum optics [1]. To represent multi-photon states, photon-number-resolving detectors (PNRDs) are widely applied in many fields [2], including the demonstration of basic principles of quantum mechanics [3], quantum computation with linear optical components [4], quantum key distribution (QKD) [5], quantum random number generation [6,7] and so forth. Traditional single-photon detectors such as Si-APD and InGaAs APD are unable to resolve the number of incident photons, though they are fully developed and applied in various fields [20]. In order to obtain the information of the incident photon statistics, considerable progress has been made in the development of PNRDs, including direct PNRDs [21] and multiplexed PNRDs [22] PNRDs play an important role in the field of biology and medicine, such as fluorescence detection [13,14], pollutant monitoring [15], flow cytometry [16], positron emission computed tomography (PET) [17,18,19].
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