Identification of nonclassical properties of light with multiplexing layouts

摘要

In a recent contribution, we introduced and applied a detector-independentmethod to uncover nonclassicality. Here, we extend those techniques and givemore details on the performed analysis. We derive a general theory of thepositive-operator-valued measure that describes multiplexing layouts witharbitrary detectors. From the resulting quantum version of a multinomialstatistics, we infer nonclassicality probes based on a matrix of normallyordered moments. We discuss these criteria and apply the theory to our datawhich are measured with superconducting transition-edge sensors. Our experimentproduces heralded multi-photon states from a parametric down-conversion lightsource. We show that the known notions of sub-Poisson and sub-binomial lightcan be deduced from our general approach, and we establish the concept ofsub-multinomial light, which is shown to outperform the former two concepts ofnonclassicality for our data.