Reconstruction of photon-number distribution using low-performance photon counters

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Guido Zambra^1,2 and Matteo G. A. Paris¹
¹Dipartimento di Fisica dell'Università di Milano, Milan, Italy
²Dipartimento di Fisica e Matematica dell'Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Como, Italy

Received 6 July 2006; published 27 December 2006

Theoutput of a photodetector consists of a current pulse whosecharge has the statistical distribution of the actual photon numbersconvolved with a Bernoulli distribution. Photodetectors are characterized by anonunit quantum efficiency, i.e., not all the photons lead toa charge, and by a finite resolution, i.e., a differentnumber of detected photons leads to a discriminable values ofthe charge only up to a maximum value. We presenta detailed comparison, based on Monte Carlo simulated experiments andreal data, among the performances of detectors with different upperlimits of counting capability. In our scheme the inversion ofBernoulli convolution is performed by maximum-likelihood methods assisted by measurementstaken at different quantum efficiencies. We show that detectors thatare only able to discriminate between zero, one and morethan one detected photons are generally enough to provide areliable reconstruction of the photon number distribution for single-peaked distributions,while detectors with higher resolution limits do not lead tofurther improvements. In addition, we demonstrate that, for semiclassical states,even on/off detectors are enough to provide a good reconstruction.Finally, we show that a reliable reconstruction of multipeaked distributionsrequires either higher quantum efficiency or higher resolution.

URL:	http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.74.063830
DOI:	10.1103/PhysRevA.74.063830
PACS:	42.50.Ar; 03.65.Wj; 85.60.Gz 42.50.Ar Photon statistics and coherence theory 03.65.Wj State reconstruction, quantum tomography 85.60.Gz Photodetectors including infrared and CCD detectors YEAR: 2006
KEYWORDS:	photodetectors, quantum optics

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