Tomography by Noise
Georg Harder, Dmitri S. Mogilevtsev, Natalia Korolkova, Christine Silberhorn · Physical Review Letters · 2014
We present an efficient and robust method for the reconstruction of photon number distributions by using solely thermal noise as a probe. The method uses a minimal number of precalibrated quantum devices; only one on-off single-photon detector is sufficient. The feasibility of the method is demonstrated by the experimental inference of single-photon, thermal. and two-photon states. The method is stable to experimental imperfections and provides a direct, user-friendly quantum diagnostics tool.