Correlation measurements with on-off detectors

Abstract

We present a general method to detect nonclassical radiation fields with systems of on-off detectors. We especially study higher order correlations for the identification of nonclassical radiation. This allows us to directly characterize quantum correlations by the statistics measured with systems of on-off detectors. Additionally, we generalize our method to multiple detector systems for measurements of correlations between light fields. We also consider multi-mode radiation fields and isolate nonclassicality in terms of the space time correlations. Finally, we present results for the quantum statistics using on-off detectors operating in nonlinear detection modes.