Entanglement-assisted scheme for nondemolition detection of the presence of a single photon

Marek Bula, Karol Bartkiewicz, Antonín Černoch, Karel Lemr

Published 2012-12-21, updated 2013-06-04Version 2

In this paper, we propose a resources-optimal linear-optical scheme for quantum nondemolition detection of single-photon presence. By measuring the state of ancillary photons, the presence of a photon in signal mode is revealed with a success probability of 1/2 without any disturbance to its state. We also show how to tune the setup to perform quantum nondemolition measurement of the signal photon state, and we provide tradeoff between the extracted information and the signal state disturbance. Moreover, the optimality of resources and methods by which to increase the success probability are discussed.