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arXiv:0809.2838 · Physical Review A

Hanbury Brown–Twiss effect and thermal light ghost imaging: A unified approach

Li‐Gang Wang, Sajid Qamar, Shi‐Yao Zhu, Muhammad Suhail Zubairy

Published Mar 24, 2009• 39 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We compare the Hanbury Brown--Twiss (HBT) and the thermal light ghost imaging schemes in both near and far fields. Both effects arise as a result of the intensity fluctuations of the thermal light and we find that the essential physics behind the two effects is the same. The difference however is that, in the ghost imaging, large number of bits information of an object needs to be treated together, whereas, in the HBT, there is only one bit information required to be obtained. In the HBT experiment far field is used for the purpose of easy detection, while in the ghost image experiment near (or not far) field is used for good quality image.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.79.033835

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We compare the Hanbury Brown--Twiss (HBT) and the thermal light ghost imaging schemes in both near and far fields. Both effects arise as a result of the intensity fluctuations of the thermal light and we find that the essential physics behind the two effects is the same. The difference however is that, in the ghost imaging, large number of bits information of an object needs to be treated together, whereas, in the HBT, there is only one bit information required to be obtained. In the HBT experiment far field is used for the purpose of easy detection, while in the ghost image experiment near (or not far) field is used for good quality image.
We studied the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) bunching effect of discrete chaotic light sources. It is found that, for periodical discrete chaotic light sources, the HBT bunching effect collapses first but then revives repeatedly at specific transverse distances between two detectors in the far-field detection plane, which is very different from the HBT bunching effect with a spatially continuous chaotic light source. Such transverse revivals of the HBT bunching effect are the result of in-phase superposition of all discrete two-photon eigen modes of the periodical discrete chaotic light sources. In addition to the integer HBT bunching revival, the fractional HBT bunching revival can also be observed with nonperiodical discrete chaotic light sources due to the in-phase constructive interference of parts of the two-photon eigen modes. Experimental verification on both the integer and the fractional HBT bunching revivals are given. The transverse revival and fractional revival of the HBT bunching effect provide an efficient way for imaging processing such as ghost image copy in the detection plane.
The Hanbury Brown–Twiss (HBT) effect, at the quantum level, is essentially an interference of one particle with another, as opposed to interference of a particle with itself. Conventional treatments of identical particles encounter difficulties while dealing with entanglement. A recently introduced label-free approach to indistinguishable particles is described, and is used to analyze the HBT effect. Quantum wave-packets have been used to provide a better understanding of the quantum interpretation of the HBT effect. The effect is demonstrated for two independent particles governed by Bose–Einstein or Fermi–Dirac statistics. The HBT effect is also analyzed for pairs of entangled particles. Surprisingly, entanglement has almost no effect on the interference seen in the HBT effect. In the light of the results, an old quantum optics experiment is reanalyzed, and it is argued that the interference seen in that experiment is not a consequence of non-local correlations between the photons, as is commonly believed. Quanta 2017; 6: 61–69.
Two-photon correlation phenomena of chaotic light, including the historical Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect, are essentially quantum effect of two-photon interference, instead of classical statistical correlation between intensity fluctuations. To support our view, we analyze a "ghost" imaging experiment with chaotic light for which the classical understanding does not give a satisfactory interpretation. We also provide a two-photon optical picture of ghost imaging with chaotic light in terms of two-photon phase-conjugate mirror which suggests lensless imaging applications for radiations for which no effective lens is available.
Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect has broad applications in optics and other branches of physics, and traditionally this effect is considered in pure spatial or temporal domain. Here we investigate the spatiotemporal HBT effect, extending this phenomenon from spatial or temporal to spatiotemporal domain. By assuming the Gaussian statistics of partially coherent spatiotemporal pulsed sources, we find the generalized analytical results for spatiotemporal HBT effect in the compact form, with the help of the matrix-optics method, which can consider the HBT effect in spatial and temporal domain simultaneously. Furthermore, for Gaussian Schell-model pulsed beams (GSMPBs) used as a spatiotemporal correlated source, we have obtained the generalized expression to calculate spatiotemporal HBT effect, which is useful for up to three-dimensional cases in any second-order linear dispersive medium. By taking a simple two-dimensional case and using air as an example of a linear dispersive medium, we numerically illustrate the properties of the spatiotemporal HBT effect by adjusting the spatial and temporal parameters of the GSMPB source, and reveal the influence of both the spatial and temporal parameters on the spatiotemporal HBT effect. This work paves the path towards the detailed study of HBT effect for a source containing spatiotemporal information with Gaussian statistics.
The observation of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect with thermal light marked the birth of quantum optics. All the thermal sources considered to date did not feature quantum signatures of light, as they consisted of independent emitters that emit uncorrelated photons. Here, we propose and demonstrate an incoherent light source based on phase-randomized spatially entangled photons, which we coin thermal biphotons. We show that in contrast to thermal light, the width of the HBT peak for thermal biphotons is determined by their correlations, leading to violation of the Siegert relation and breakdown of the speckle-fluctuations interpretation. We further provide an alternative interpretation of the results by drawing a connection between the HBT effect and coherent backscattering of light. Finally, we discuss the role of spatial entanglement in the observed results, deriving a relation between the Schmidt number and the degree of violation of the Siegert relation under the double-Gaussian approximation of spontaneous parametric down conversion. Our work reflects new insights on the coherence properties of thermal light in the presence of entanglement, paving the way for entanglement certification using disorder averaged measurements.