The progress in building large quantum states and networks requires sophisticated detection techniques to verify the desired operation. To achieve this aim, a cost- and resource-efficient detection method is the time multiplexing of photonic states. This design is assumed to be efficiently scalable; however, it is restricted by inevitable losses and limited detection efficiencies. Here, we investigate the scalability of time-multiplexed detectors under the effects of fiber dispersion and losses. We use the distinguishability of Fock states up to n=20 after passing the time-multiplexed detector as our figure of merit and find that, for realistic setup efficiencies of η=0.85, the optimal size for time-multiplexed detectors is 256 bins.
@article{arxiv.1611.04360,
title = {Limits of the time-multiplexed photon-counting method},
author = {Regina Kruse and Johannes Tiedau and Tim J. Bartley and Sonja Barkhofen and Christine Silberhorn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.04360},
year = {2017}
}