An Optimal Photon Counting Polarimeter

Abstract

We present experimental results on a method to perform polarimetry on ensembles of single photons. Our setup is based on a measurement method known to be optimal for estimating the state of two level systems. The setup has no moving parts and is sensitive to weak sources (emitting single photons) of light as it relies on photon counting and has potential applications in both classical polarization measurements and quantum communication scenarios. In our implementation, we are able to reconstruct the Stokes parameters of pure polarization states with an average fidelity of 99.9%.

Rev 1, added references and revised title. Accepted by the Journal of Modern Optics

References in corpus (3)

• On the Measurement of Qubits
• High efficiency entangled photon pair collection in type II parametric fluorescence
• Minimal qubit tomography

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• Product measurements and fully symmetric measurements in qubit-pair tomography: A numerical study
• Numeric estimation of resource requirements for a practical polarization-frame alignment scheme for QKD
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• State learning from pairs of states