Tomography of a single-atom-resolved detector in the presence of shot-to-shot number fluctuations

TL;DR

This paper develops a method for performing quantum detector tomography on a single-atom-resolved detector affected by shot-to-shot atom number fluctuations, using parallel measurement of counting statistics to mitigate noise effects.

Contribution

It introduces a local tomography technique that accounts for shot-to-shot fluctuations, enabling accurate characterization of 3D single-atom detectors.

Findings

The method successfully characterizes Gaussian quantum states with different statistics.

Micro-Channel Plate detectors' response is well-described by a binomial distribution.

The approach improves detector calibration in noisy quantum measurement scenarios.

Abstract

Tomography of single-particle-resolved detectors is of primary importance for characterizing particle correlations with applications in quantum metrology, quantum simulation and quantum computing. However, it is a non-trivial task in practice due to the unavoidable presence of noise that affects the measurement but does not originate from the detector. In this work, we address this problem for a three-dimensional single-atom-resolved detector where shot-to-shot atom number fluctuations are a central issue to perform a quantum detector tomography. We overcome this difficulty by exploiting the parallel measurement of counting statistics in sub-volumes of the detector, from which we evaluate the effect of shot-to-shot fluctuations and perform a local tomography of the detector. In addition, we illustrate the validity of our method from applying it to Gaussian quantum states with different number statistics. Finally, we show that the response of Micro-Channel Plate detectors is well-described from using a binomial distribution with the detection efficiency as a single parameter.