Conditional preparation of states containing a definite number of photons
Malcolm N. O’Sullivan, Kam Wai Clifford Chan, Vasudevan Lakshminarayanan, Robert W. Boyd · Physical Review A · 2008
A technique for conditionally creating single-mode or multimode photon-number states is analyzed using Bayesian theory. We consider the heralded $N$-photon states created from the photons produced by an unseeded optical parametric amplifier when the heralding detector is the time-multiplexed photon-number-resolving detector recently demonstrated by Fitch et al. [Phys. Rev. A 68, 043814 (2003)] and simultaneously by Achilles et al. [Opt. Lett. 28, 2387 (2003)]. We find that even with significant loss in the heralding detector, fields with sub-Poissonian photon-number distributions can be created. We also show that heralded multimode fields created using this technique are more robust against detector loss than are single-mode fields.