A high dynamic range optical detector for measuring single photons and bright light

Detecting light is fundamental to all optical experiments and applications. At the single photon level, the quantized nature of light requires specialised detectors, which typically saturate when more than one photon is incident. Here, we report on a massively-multiplexed single-photon detector, which exploits the saturation regime of a single click detector to exhibit a dynamic range of 123 dB, enabling measurement from optical energies as low as 10^{- 7} photons per pulse to ∼ 2.5 × 10⁵photons per pulse. This allows us to calibrate a single photon detector directly to a power meter, as well as characterize the nonclassical features of a variety of quantum states.