Tomography of a displacement photon counter for discrimination of single-rail optical qubits

Abstract

We investigate the performance of a Kennedy receiver, which is known as a beneficial tool in optical coherent communications, to the quantum state discrimination of the two superpositions of vacuum and single photon states corresponding to the ${\hat{\sigma }}_x$ eigenstates in the single-rail encoding of photonic qubits. We experimentally characterize the Kennedy receiver in vacuum-single photon two-dimensional space using quantum detector tomography and evaluate the achievable discrimination error probability from the reconstructed measurement operators. We furthermore derive the minimum error rate obtainable with Gaussian transformations and homodyne detection. Our proof of principle experiment shows that the Kennedy receiver can achieve a discrimination error surpassing homodyne detection.

References in corpus (11)

• Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors: physics and applications
• Experimental Quantum State Tomography of Optical Fields and Ultrafast Statistical Sampling
• Measuring measurement
• Discrimination of the binary coherent signal: Gaussian-operation limit and simple non-Gaussian near-optimal receivers
• Demonstration of near-Optimal Discrimination of Optical Coherent States
• Mapping coherence in measurement via full quantum tomography of a hybrid optical detector
• Displacement receiver for phase-shift-keyed coherent states
• Quantum receivers with squeezing and photon-number-resolving detectors
• Binary projective measurement via linear optics and photon counting
• Adaptive Phase Measurements in Linear Optical Quantum Computation
• Projective measurement onto arbitrary superposition of coherent state bases

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Experimental demonstration of a quantum receiver beating the standard quantum limit at the telecom wavelength
• Tomography of a Feedback Measurement with Photon Detection
• Homodyne tomography with homodyne-like detection
• Quantum State Discrimination on Reconfigurable Noise-Robust Quantum Networks
• Indirect Measurement for Optimal Quantum Communication Enhanced by Binary Non-standard Coherent States