| 日期 26 August 2025
In June, the Swabian Instruments team attended Laser World of Photonics and World of Quantum at the Messe München, Germany. These conferences were not only filled with meeting our global customers and others within quantum communities, but also served as an opportunity to unveil our newest partnership with ID Quantique (IDQ), showing photon number resolution (PNR) with their parallel superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (p-SNSPDs) and our Time Taggers. This year, we had one booth in Laser World of Photonics, where we presented all our live demonstrations, including lifetime measurement, real-time remote synchronization leveraging White Rabbit, and a button presser game to test reaction speed with picosecond resolution. In addition, we had a booth at a parallel exhibition, World of Quantum, where we showcased our Time Tagger X.
We were thrilled to highlight our collaboration with ID Quantique (IDQ) at their booth, where our product was showcased as part of our ongoing partnership. Through combining IDQ’s powerful p-SNSPDs with our precise Time Taggers and versatile software, we have demonstrated the capability for photon number resolution (PNR), the ability to distinguish between the exact number of photons in a received pulse. By simultaneously time-stamping rising and falling edges of a pulse and streaming them in real-time, users are able to measure the pulse width, and therefore, decipher how many photons are contributing to the pulse.
For more information, check out this video, in which our Global Head of Sales and Marketing, Thomas Hayes, explains just how this method works.
Our participation at Laser World of Photonics and World of Quantum 2025 was a significant opportunity to strengthen connections across the quantum research community and showcase the capabilities of our technology. We highlighted our new partnership with IDQ, where we demonstrated photon number resolution using their p-SNSPDs together with our Time Taggers. This demonstration showed how combining precise photon detection with high-resolution timing enables researchers to study multiphoton events with clarity, advancing applications in quantum optics, quantum communication, and single-photon science. Alongside this, our live demonstrations of fluorescence lifetime measurement, real-time remote synchronization with White Rabbit, and a reaction-time game highlighted the versatility and accessibility of our systems. These conferences emphasized both the value of collaboration and our ongoing commitment to providing tools that support progress in photon number resolution and photon-counting instrumentation.
Photon number resolution (PNR) is an enabling technique used to assign the number of photons involved in a detection event precisely. This technique leverages photon-number-resolving single-photon detectors as well as sophisticated signal analysis, and it is necessary for quantum cryptography and quantum communication.
Read more
Quantum communication describes cutting-edge techniques to distribute information using the quantum properties of single photons. One of the most important applications is providing secure channels of communication using a technique known as quantum key distribution (QKD). Unlike classical public-key cryptography, which is susceptible to decryption by future quantum computing-based decryption algorithms, QKD offers unconditional security.
Read more