Twin-photon techniques for photo-detector calibration

✍ Scribed by G. Brida; M. Genovese; M. Gramegna

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 158 KB
• Volume: 3
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1612-2011
• DOI: 10.1002/lapl.200510077

✦ Synopsis

The aim of this review paper is to enlighten some recent progresses in quantum optical metrology in the part of quantum efficiency measurements of photo-detectors performed with bi-photon states.

The intrinsic correlated nature of entangled photons from Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion phenomenon has opened wide horizons to a new approach for the absolute measurement of photo-detector quantum efficiency, outgoing the requirement for conventional standards of optical radiation; in particular the simultaneous feature of the creation of conjugated photons led to a well known technique of coincidence measurement, deeply understood and implemented for standard uses.

On the other hand, based on manipulation of entanglement developed for Quantum Information protocols implementations, a new method has been proposed for quantum efficiency measurement, exploiting polarisation entanglement in addition to energy-momentum and time ones, that is based on conditioned polarisation state manipulation.

In this review, after a general discussion on absolute photo-detector calibration, we compare these different methods, in order to give an accurate operational sketch of the absolute quantum efficiency measurement state of the art.