Measurement of photon number statistics using photon-number resolving detectors
Nicola N Low, Sai Sreesh Venuturumilli, Michal Bajcsy · 2025
We investigate the use of a photon-number resolving (PNR) detector as an alternative method for measuring the second-order correlation function g2(0). Our implementation employs four spatially multiplexed single-photon detectors to reconstruct the photon number distribution P(n) from click statistics. We estimate g2(0) for both coherent and quantum dot excition emission, and compare the results to those obtained from a conventional Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) setup. In the single-mode regime, we observe close agreement between both approaches. We additionally compare the acquisition times required for each method and find that PNR-based measurements enable faster estimation of g2(0), offering potential advantages for scalable characterisation of quantum light sources.