Direct, Loss-Tolerant Characterization of Nonclassical Photon Statistics
Daryl Achilles, Christine Silberhorn, Ian A. Walmsley · Physical Review Letters · 2006
We experimentally investigate a method of directly characterizing the photon-number distribution of nonclassical light beams that is tolerant to losses and makes use of only standard binary detectors. This is achieved in a single measurement by calibrating the detector using some small amount of prior information about the source. We demonstrate the technique on a freely propagating heralded two-photon-number state created by conditional detection of a two-mode squeezed state generated by parametric down-conversion.