Eur. Phys. J. D (2012) 66: 249
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2012-30351-6

Regular Article

Effect of the heralding detector properties on the conditional generation of single-photon states

¹ Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée, CNRS UMR 7336, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Parc Valrose, 06108 Nice Cedex 2, France
² Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, Case 74, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France

^a e-mail: julien.laurat@upmc.fr

Received: 4 June 2012
Published online: 4 October 2012

Abstract

Single-photons play an important role in emerging quantum technologies and information processing. An efficient generation technique consists in preparing such states via a conditional measurement on photon-number correlated beams: the detection of a single-photon on one of the beam can herald the generation of a single-photon state on the other one. Such scheme strongly depends on the heralding detector properties, such as its quantum efficiency, noise or photon-number resolution ability. These parameters affect the preparation rate and the fidelity of the generated state. After reviewing the theoretical description of optical detectors and conditional measurements, and how both are here connected, we evaluate the effects of these properties and compare two kinds of devices, a conventional on/off detector and a two-channel detector with photon-number resolution ability.