Certification of quantum properties of single-photon detectors
Our work on quantum-feature certification for single-photon detectors was published in Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.043601, arXiv: 2101.03509. We proposed and experimentally demonstrated a procedure for direct certification of quantum non-Gaussianity and Wigner function negativity of photonic quantum detectors. Surprisingly, probing a detector with only two classical thermal states and a vacuum state is sufficient to certify the highly nonclassical features; our procedure requires much fewer probe states than full quantum detector tomography. The most important aspect of our work is that any detector can be characterized even when it is described by a positive operator-valued measure (POVM) element with the infinite norm. The thermal states used for probing act as renormalization for such a POVM.
The work was presented on Photonic Online Meetup as Twitter poster.