title: Harnessing click detectors for the genuine characterization of light states.
abstract: The key requirement for harnessing the quantum properties of light is the capability to detect and count individual photons. Of particular interest are photon-number-resolving detectors, which allow one to determine whether a state of light is classical or genuinely quantum. Existing schemes for addressing this challenge rely on a proportional conversion of photons to electrons. As such, they are capable of correctly characterizing small photon fluxes, yet are limited by uncertainties in the conversion rate. In this work, we employ a divide-and-conquer approach to infallibly discerning non-classicality of states of light. This is achieved by transforming the incident fields into uniform spatial distributions that readily lend themselves for characterization by standard on-off detectors. Since the exact statistics of the light stream in multiplexed on-off detectors are click statistics, our technique is freely scalable to accommodate-in principle-arbitrarily large photon fluxes. Our experiments pave the way towards genuine integrated photon-number-resolving detection for advanced on-chip photonic quantum networks.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Albert-EInstein-Straße 15, 07745 Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: René
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Heilmann
authors.affiliation: Arbeitsgruppe Quantenoptik, Institute für Physik, Universität Rostock, D-18051 Rostock, Germany.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sperling
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Albert-EInstein-Straße 15, 07745 Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Armando
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Perez-Leija
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Albert-EInstein-Straße 15, 07745 Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gräfe
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Albert-EInstein-Straße 15, 07745 Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Matthias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Heinrich
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Albert-EInstein-Straße 15, 07745 Jena, Germany.|Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering, Albert-Einstein-Straße 707745 Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nolte
authors.affiliation: Arbeitsgruppe Quantenoptik, Institute für Physik, Universität Rostock, D-18051 Rostock, Germany.
authors.forename: Werner
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Vogel
authors.affiliation: Institute of Applied Physics, Abbe Center of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Albert-EInstein-Straße 15, 07745 Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Szameit