Light statistics by non-calibrated linear photodetectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to characterize photon statistics using non-calibrated linear photodetectors with internal gain, validated through experiments with classical fields, enabling accurate photon number distribution reconstruction without prior gain knowledge.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel theoretical and experimental approach for self-consistent photon statistics characterization using non-calibrated linear detectors with internal gain.

Findings

Method accurately reconstructs photon number distributions.

Works for both microscopic and mesoscopic photon numbers.

Experimental results agree with independent photon number reconstructions.

Abstract

We theoretically demonstrate that detectors endowed with internal gain and operated in regimes in which they do not necessarily behave as photon-counters, but still ensure linear input/output responses, can allow a self-consistent characterization of the statistics of the number of detected photons without need of knowing their gain. We present experiments performed with a photo-emissive hybrid detector on a number of classical fields endowed with non-trivial statistics and show that the method works for both microscopic and mesoscopic photon numbers. The obtained detected-photon probability distributions agree with those expected for the photon numbers, which are also reconstructed by an independent method.