Response of ideal photodetectors to photon flux and/or energy flux

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Abstract
A theory of photoelectron counting is presented which combines the perturbation-theory approach of Glauber with the damped field model of Mollow. It is shown that, to first order in field spectral bandwidth, broadband photodetectors respond to photon flux rather than power. By phenomenologically including the effect of the detector on the field, the drawbacks and inconsistencies which limit the validity of traditional perturbative calculations to cases of very low quantum efficiency are eliminated.