Abstract

The continuing development of photon detectors has significant impact across a broad range of fields, from quantum information science to astronomy and biomedical imaging. The latest state-of-the-art detectors, including transition-edge sensor (TES) detectors, are highly sensitive single-photon detectors with quantum efficiencies of up to 98% and true photon-number sensitivity [1]. With these new regimes of performance come additional challenges in detector characterisation. Unlike traditional Geiger-mode avalanche photodiode detectors, many photon-number resolving detectors produce a complex time varying signal from which the input state must be inferred. Efficiently extracting information from these detectors is therefore an open problem with significance for realising the full capability of such detectors across all applications [2–4].

© 2015 IEEE