Positive operator-valued measure reconstruction of a beam-splitter tree-based photon-number-resolving detector

Opt Lett. 2015 Apr 1;40(7):1548-51. doi: 10.1364/OL.40.001548.

Abstract

Here we present a reconstruction of the positive operator-value measurement of a photon-number-resolving detector comprised of three 50∶50 beam-splitters in a tree configuration, terminated with four single-photon avalanche detectors. The four detectors' outputs are processed by an electronic board that discriminates detected photon number states from 0 to 4 and implements a "smart counting" routine to compensate for dead time issues at high count rates.