Superconducting PNR Detector for Photon Sources Characterization

A superconducting photon number resolving detector can distinguish between different numbers of incoming photons. This makes it useful for many applications, such as boson sampling, quantum optics and communication. In particular, in this work we focused on the characterization of non-pulsed photon sources at the telecom wavelength 1550 nm by means of a superconducting device. We measured the response matrix of the detector and we reconstructed the Poissonian distribution of the number of photons emitted by a continuous wave laser light source.