Laser World of Photonics & World of Quantum 2025 – Synchronization, QKD, and Time and Frequency

| on 26 August 2025

The Swabian Instruments team (eight members) in front of the Swabian Instruments exhibition booth, which shows banners detailing the device specs and a live demonstration, at the Laser World Photonics 2025. The live demonstration shows a Fluorescence Lifetime experimental setup, in which a pulsed laser sends a pulse into a sample, and a SPAD detects the arrival of the emitted photon. The Time Tagger Lab is shown on a monitor, with the histogrammed curve of the fluorescence lifetime of the sample. — Swabian Instruments team at the exhibition booth at Laser World of Photonics - (Left to Right) Matteo Moioli, Edoardo Mornacchi, Yulia Matiks, Michael Schlagmüller, Zeynab Tavakoli, Ginger Geng, Uwe Schumann, and Thomas Hayes.

Laser World of Photonics & World of Quantum 2025 – Synchronization, QKD, and Time and Frequency

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.

ID Quantique X Swabian Instruments Partnership

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.

Thomas Hayes (Swabian Instruments President, Americas) and Marc Nikles (ID Quantique, CRO) at the ID Quantique exhibition booth for Laser World Photonics 2025. A rack standing in between the two of them displays Swabian Instruments Time Tagger X, ID Quantique p-SNSPDs, and a photon number resolving measurement, as part of the newest partnership. — Swabian Instruments’ Global Head of Sales and Marketing), Thomas Hayes and ID Quantique CRO, Marc Nikles, showcasing a photon-number-resolution measurement with Swabian Instruments Time Tagger X and ID Quantique p-SNSPDs, as part of our newest partnership.

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.

Relevant topics

Photon Number Resolution (PNR)

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.

Quantum Communication

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.