Our main tool for quantum optics are single photon detectors. We especially use superconducting single-photon detectors since they are one of the best performing detectors on the market. However, these detectors require cryogenic operation temperatures. That means for us that we can only operate a limited number of detectors in a single cryostat. To conduct experiments with more detectors and show more elaborate setups, we require more scalable…
This week, Amélie De Koninck completed the first part of her voluntary student internship in our group. With us, she was able to gain many impressions of experimental physics, especially quantum optics. Together with Timon Schapeler, who supervised the internship, she experienced everyday life in the laboratory. The aim was to investigate the statistics of attenuated laser light using a 4-bin multiplexed single-photon detector. To do this, Amélie…
Yesterday we had our summer group event at the new Adventure Golf course in Paderborn at the Fischteiche. We had a lot of fun and our group members and their families enjoyed the beautiful weather and the sun. At the end of the evening we all had dinner together in an Italian restaurant.
In this two-dimensional histogram, the elliptical clusters correspond to different photon-number events registered by the SNSPD. This is a result from the principal component analysis (PCA), which was applied in this work.
Recently, it has been shown that so-called "superconducting nanowire single photon detectors" (SNSPD) can not only provide information about the presence or absence of photons, but also resolve the number of incident photons in a laser pulse. In this work, we investigated where this photon-number information is located on the electrical output signal (trace) of the SNSPD and how it can be best retrieved in an experiment. We did this by recording…
Last week four members of our group went to the Quantum 2.0 conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands. They enjoyed a great meeting and had a lot of time to network and talk about their work.
We contributed with two presentations and one poster:
Timon Schapeler talked about "Photon-number resolution with SNSPDs via statistical analysis of electrical traces" Frederik Thiele talked his work about "Opto-Electronic Operation of an SNSPD with a…
Two of our group members contributed to a conference in Gaeta, Italy last week. It was a meeting of the Horizon 2020 FET OPEN project Stormytune with the name "Spectral-Temporal Metrology with Tailored Quantum Measurements".
Aishi Barua presented her poster about "Investigating Homodyne Detection with Squeezed Light as the Local Oscillator". Lorenzo Procopio presented his talk about "Quantum Metrology Enhancement using Indefinite casual…
Last week three members went to the conference CLEO in Charlotte. The conference was about Lasers, electro-optics, and photonic applications. In addition, our former colleague Maximilian Protte joined us again and presented work which was realized in Paderborn. We presented our works in contributing talks and poster presentations:
Niklas Lamberty: Maximizing photon-number resolution from an SNSPD Maximilian Protte: Performing Balanced…
We welcome Lorenzo M. Procopio, who joined our group as a Post Doc.
After our 7th group reflection meeting last week, we had dinner together at Mundus in Paderborn.
Last week, four members of our group attended the spring meeting of the Atoms, Molecules, Quantum Optics and Photonics Section of the German Physical Society (DPG SAMOP). The conference took place from 10th to 15th of March in Freiburg. During the conference we presented the following contributions:
Niklas Lamberty - Maximizing photon-number resolution from an SNSPD (Talk) Isabell Mischke - Multiwavelength Characterization of Polarization…
We build photonic circuits for quantum optics with the material system lithium niobate. The material system enables us to realize several devices such as quantum light sources and modulators. For several applications we need to cool the material system down to cryogenic temperatures (below 10K). The challenge with photonic circuits is to maintain a high device performance at cryogenic temperatures. We managed to maintain a good performance for…
Dr. Maximilian Protte talks about our newest publication on low-noise balanced homodyne detection with superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors.
We just posted a new video about our latest publication in Optica Quantum from Maximilian Protte and Timon Schapeler. In this video Maximilian talks about the experiment and the results. It can be found here, it was edited by Jessika Bruns. The original news article can be found here and the publication here.
We congratulate Isabell Mischke for successfully defending her bachelor thesis about "Broadband Characterization of Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors".
