Counting of Hong-Ou-Mandel Bunched Optical Photons Using a Fast Pixel Camera

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that a high-resolution silicon pixel camera can effectively detect and distinguish bunched optical photons generated via Hong-Ou-Mandel interference, enabling advanced quantum optics measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of a fast pixel camera for counting bunched photons and validates its capabilities with experimental Hong-Ou-Mandel interference data.

Findings

Camera can resolve two photons arriving simultaneously

Successful detection of photon bunching via Hong-Ou-Mandel effect

Camera's spatial and temporal resolution enables photon counting

Abstract

The uses of a silicon-pixel camera with very good time resolution ($\sim$nanosecond) for detecting multiple, bunched optical photons is explored. We present characteristics of the camera and describe experiments proving its counting capabilities. We use a spontaneous parametric down-conversion source to generate correlated photon pairs, and exploit the Hong-Ou-Mandel interference effect in a fiber-coupled beam splitter to bunch the pair onto the same output fiber. It is shown that the time and spatial resolution of the camera enables independent detection of two photons emerging simultaneously from a single spatial mode.