We theoretically demonstrate that detectors endowed with internal gain and operated in regimes in which they do not necessarily behave as photon-counters, but still ensure linear input/output responses, can allow a self-consistent characterization of the statistics of the number of detected photons without need of knowing their gain. We present experiments performed with a photo-emissive hybrid detector on a number of classical fields endowed with non-trivial statistics and show that the method works for both microscopic and mesoscopic photon numbers. The obtained detected-photon probability distributions agree with those expected for the photon numbers, which are also reconstructed by an independent method.
@article{arxiv.0810.4026,
title = {Light statistics by non-calibrated linear photodetectors},
author = {Maria Bondani and Alessia Allevi and Alessandra Andreoni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0810.4026},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
submitted to the special issue "Tests of foundations of Quantum Mechanics" of "Advanced Science Letters"