On/off Detection Method for Reconstructing the Statistics of Quantum Optical States: An Overview

We give a brief overview of the demonstration of a photon statistics reconstruction method based on Maximum Likelihood estimation and on/off detection. This method has been successfully applied to a large number of cases and, recently, extended to a scheme for a full reconstruction of the density matrix. Experimental results concerning the heralded single-photon state and the seeded parametric down-conversion are presented in some details.