2015: New method for tomography of spatial mode detectors�

Researchers from Prof. S.P.Kulik’s group at the Department of Physics, MSU have developed the experimental method for detector tomography of optical spatial mode detectors.

One of the main goals for modern telecommunication science is to increase the capacity of the communication channel. It is especially relevant for quantum communication, where data transmission rate is seriously limited by the performance of single photon counters. One of the ways to overcome the limitations is to use high-dimensional spatial mode encoding and/or multiplexing. This approach uses spatial shape of light beams to encode information. Spatial encoding requires adaptive optics to actively transform the spatial profile of the beam by means of specially designed phase holograms. Same methods are used in the detection part. Unfortunately, the existing methods do not allow for perfect mode transformations leading to significant level of errors in the detection. Researchers from Prof. Kulik�s group have proposed and implemented the method for careful calibration of such detectors, inspired by the ideas from quantum tomography. The developed method allows one to completely characterize the real detector and use this information for error correction.

The results of this work were published in the paper: I.B. Bobrov, E.V. Kovlakov, A.A. Markov, S.S. Straupe, and S.P. Kulik, “Tomography of spatial mode detectors”, Opt. Express 23, 649 (2015)