2010/11/30 by Y. -F. Chen, D. Hover, S. Sendelbach +5 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.supr-con #cond-mat.mes-hall #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.107.217401
5 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2011/11/07 · arxiv updated 2015/05/20
We describe a microwave photon counter based on the current-biased Josephson junction. The junction is tuned to absorb single microwave photons from the incident field, after which it tunnels into a classically observable voltage state. Using two such detectors, we have performed a microwave version of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment at 4 GHz and demonstrated a clear signature of photon bunching for a thermal source. The design is readily scalable to tens of parallelized junctions, a configuration that would allow number-resolved counting of microwave photons.