Photon-number-resolving detectors for quantum-state engineering: introduction to the feature issue

Generation and measurement of quantum states of light represent a hot and widely discussed topic in the physical community for their possible applications to quantum optics and quantum information. To this aim, it is desirable that optical states are robust with respect to losses and can be produced and addressed at high rates. In fact, mesoscopic pulsed optical states containing few photons per pulse seem to be the ideal candidates for applications to quantum communication protocols. For all these reasons, during the last two decades many efforts have been devoted to the development of new kinds of detectors that can operate in such a photon-number-resolving domain.