Quantum efficiency measurements by bidirectional coincidence counting of correlated photon pairs

摘要

We propose and demonstrate a procedure for characterizing the quantum efficiency of a single-photon detectorin the telecommunication wavelength band. Our procedure employs a bidirectional coincidence counting technique to distinguish optical component losses from the detection efficiency. The standard deviations of the measured quantum efficiencies were nearly identical to the standard deviations derived from a detection probability having a Poisson distribution.