Tomography of photon-number resolving continuous-output detectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive method for analyzing continuous-output photon detectors, combining principal component analysis and a novel tomography approach, demonstrated on a transition-edge sensor, and includes a new measure for photon-number-resolving capability.

Contribution

It presents a new, noise-tolerant tomography method for continuous-output PNRDs and a measure to quantify their photon-number-resolving ability, applicable to all such detectors.

Findings

Effective principal component analysis for information extraction

Successful application to experimental TES data

New measure for photon-number-resolving capability

Abstract

We report a comprehensive approach to analysing continuous-output photon detectors. We employ principal component analysis to maximise the information extracted, followed by a novel noise-tolerant parameterised approach to the tomography of PNRDs. We further propose a measure for rigorously quantifying a detector's photon-number-resolving capability. Our approach applies to all detectors with continuous-output signals. We illustrate our methods by applying them to experimental data obtained from a transition-edge sensor (TES) detector.