High-efficiency optical detectors that can determine the number of photons in a pulse of monochromatic light have applications in a variety of physics studies, including post-selection-based entanglement protocols for linear optics quantum computing and experiments that simultaneously close the detection and communication loopholes of Bell's inequalities. Here we report on our demonstration of fiber-coupled, noise-free, photon-number-resolving transition-edge sensors with 88% efficiency at 1550 nm. The efficiency of these sensors could be made even higher at any wavelength in the visible and near-infrared spectrum without resulting in a higher dark-count rate or degraded photon-number resolution.
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0506175,
title = {Noise-free high-efficiency photon-number-resolving detectors},
author = {Danna Rosenberg and Adriana E. Lita and Aaron J. Miller and Sae Woo Nam},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0506175},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures Published in Physical Review A, Rapid Communications, 17 June 2005