Amplification and Detection of Single Itinerant Microwave Photons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Single-photon detectors are an essential part of the toolbox of modern quantum optics for implementing quantum technologies and enabling tests of fundamental physics. The low energy of microwave photons, the natural signal path for superconducting quantum devices, makes their detection much harder than for visible light. Despite impressive progress in recent years and the proposal and realization of a number of different detector architectures, the reliable detection of a single itinerant microwave photon remains an open topic. Here, we investigate and simulate a detailed protocol for single-photon multiplication and subsequent amplification and detection. At its heart lies a Josephson-photonics device which uses inelastic Cooper-pair tunneling driven by a dc bias in combination with the energy of an incoming photon to create multiple photons, thus compensating for the low-energy problem. Our analysis provides clear design guidelines for utilizing such devices, which have previously been operated in an amplifier mode with a continuous wave input, for counting photons. Combining a formalism recently developed by Mølmer to describe the full quantum state of in- and outgoing photon pulses with stochastic Schrödinger equations, we can describe the full multiplication and detection protocol and calculate performance parameters, such as detection probabilities and dark count rates. With optimized parameters, a high population of a single output mode can be achieved that can then be easily distinguished from vacuum noise in heterodyne measurements of quadratures with a conventional linear amplifier. Realistic devices with two multiplication stages with multiplication of $16$ reach for an impinging Gaussian pulse of length $T$ a detection probability of $84.5\%$ with a dark count rate of $10^{-3}/T$, and promise to outperform competing schemes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".