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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Validating the calibrated creation of heralded single photons

Daniel Borrero Landazabal* and Kaisa Laiho

  • German Aerospace Center (DLR e.V.), Institute of Quantum Technologies, Wilhelm-Runge-Straße 10, 89081 Ulm, Germany

  • *Contact author: daniel.borrerolandazabal@dlr.de
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L032013 – Published 22 July, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/k9q5-n4wn

Abstract

Coincidence-count discrimination is a practical and straightforward tool for the characterization of photon-pair processes and heralded single photons. Here, we implement a heralded single photon source based on parametric down-conversion in a periodically poled KTiOPO4 waveguide in the telecom wavelength range involving a low number of optical modes. We extend the toolbox for the loss-tolerant state characterization by combining conventional figures of merit in order to access the heralded state's mean photon number and its photon-number parity. Our experiment demonstrates that an accurate determination of these characteristics is possible just through simple photon-correlation measurements. We believe that our results can find usage in the calibrated creation of heralded single photons and in determining the expectation values of observables that are crucial for attributing a single quantum.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L032013– Published 22 July, 2026
  • Received 19 December 2025
  • Accepted 18 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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