Accessing photon bunching with a photon number resolving multi-pixel detector

In quantum optics and its applications, there is an urgent demand for photon-number resolving detectors. Recently, there appeared multi-pixel counters (MPPC) that are able to distinguish between 1,2,..10 photons. At the same time, strong coupling between different pixels (crosstalk) hinders their photon-number resolution. In this work, we suggest a method for 'filtering out' the crosstalk effect in the measurement of intensity correlation functions. The developed approach can be expanded to the analysis of higher-order intensity correlations by using just a single MPPC. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America