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arXiv · 0810.4026

Light statistics by non-calibrated linear photodetectors

Maria Bondani·Alessia Allevi·Alessandra Andreoni
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Abstract

We theoretically demonstrate that detectors endowed with internal gain and operated in regimes in which they do not necessarily behave as photon-counters, but still ensure linear input/output responses, can allow a self-consistent characterization of the statistics of the number of detected photons without need of knowing their gain. We present experiments performed with a photo-emissive hybrid detector on a number of classical fields endowed with non-trivial statistics and show that the method works for both microscopic and mesoscopic photon numbers. The obtained detected-photon probability distributions agree with those expected for the photon numbers, which are also reconstructed by an independent method.

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Maria Bondani, Alessia Allevi, Alessandra Andreoni. 2008-10-22. Light statistics by non-calibrated linear photodetectors. https://arxiv.org/abs/0810.4026

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