Single-photon detectors are ``blind" after the detection of a photon, and thereafter display a characteristic recovery in efficiency, during which the number of undetected photons depends on the statistics of the incident light. We show how the efficiency-recovery, photon statistics and intensity have an interdependent relationship which suppresses a detector's ability to count photons and measure correlations. We also demonstrate this effect with an experiment using n such detectors to determine the nth order correlation function with pseudothermal light.
@article{arxiv.2411.12835,
title = {Measuring photon correlation using imperfect detectors},
author = {Rachel N. Clark and Sam G. Bishop and Joseph K. Cannon and John P. Hadden and Philip R. Dolan and Alastair G. Sinclair and Anthony J. Bennett},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.12835},
year = {2024}
}