• Corpus ID: 229331567

Precisely determining photon-number in real-time

@inproceedings{Morais2020PreciselyDP,
  title={Precisely determining photon-number in real-time},
  author={Leonardo Assis Morais and Till Weinhold and Marcelo P. Almeida and Joshua Combes and Adriana E. Lita and Thomas Gerrits and Sae Woo Nam and Andrew G. White and Geoff Gillett Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems and School of Mathematics and Physics and University of Southern Queensland and Department of Electrical and Computer and Energy Engineering and University of Colorado Boulder and National Institute of Standards and Technology and Quantum Valley Ideas Lab},
  year={2020}
}

• L. A. Morais, T. Weinhold, +16 authors Quantum Valley Ideas Lab
• Published 18 December 2020
• Physics

Superconducting transition-edge sensors (TES) are sensitive microcalorimeters used as photon detectors with unparalleled energy resolution. They have found application from measuring astronomical spec-tra through to determining the quantum property of photon-number, ˆ n =ˆ a † ˆ a , for en-ergies from 0.6–2.33 eV. However, achiev-ing optimal energy resolution requires con-siderable data acquisition—on the order of 1 GB/min—followed by post-processing, which prevent access to energy information in real time. We report a custom hardware processor to process TES pulses while new detections are still being registered, allowing photon-number to be measured in real time. We resolve photon number up to n =16 —achieving up to parts-per-billion discrimination for low photon numbers on the fly—providing transforma-tional capacity for TES applications from astronomy through to quantum technology.