Benchmarking single-photon sources from an auto-correlation measurement

Characterizing heralded single-photon sources with imperfect measurement devices

Any characterization of a single-photon source is not complete without specifying its second-order degree of coherence, i.e., its g function. An accurate measurement of such coherence functions commonly requires high-precision singlephoton detectors, in whose absence, only time-averaged measurements are possible. It is not clear, however, how the resulting time-averaged quantities can be used t...

Multi-photon entanglement from distant single photon sources on demand

We describe a scheme that allows for the generation of any desired N-photon state on demand. Under ideal conditions, this requires only N single photon sources, laser pulses and linear optics elements. First, the sources should be initialised with the help of single-qubit rotations and repeat-until-success two-qubit quantum gates [Lim et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 030305 (2005)]. Afterwards, the...

Single Photon Sources

Single and Entangled Photon Sources

This paper explores the fundamentals and applications of single and entangled photon sources. These sources are the ground works for advances in quantum communications, ranging from quantum cryptography to topics as peculiar as quantum teleportation. Single Photon Sources I. What is a Single Photon Source? A single photon source is an emitter of light that has all of its photons separated in ti...

Single and Entangled Photon Sources

The possibility of totally secure communication through the application of quantum mechanical properties was introduced in 1984 by Bennett and Brassard in their paper, “Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing”. As Bennett and Brassard outlined, quantum communication makes it impossible for an eavesdropper to intercept a message without detection by the desired parties. Th...