Direct, Loss-Tolerant Characterization of Nonclassical Photon Statistics

Abstract

We experimentally investigate a method of directly characterizing the photon number distribution of nonclassical light beams that is tolerant to losses and makes use only of standard binary detectors. This is achieved in a single measurement by calibrating the detector using some small amount of prior information about the source. We demonstrate the technique on a freely propagating heralded two-photon number state created by conditional detection of a two-mode squeezed state generated by a parametric downconverter.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Photon number resolution using a time-multiplexed single-photon detector
• Direct observation of non-classical photon statistics in parametric downconversion

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