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arXiv:1001.1411 · Physical Review Letters

Experimental Determination of the Statistics of Photons Emitted by a Tunnel Junction

Eva Zakka-Bajjani, Joseph Dufouleur, N. Coulombel, P. Roche, D. C. Glattli, F. Portier

Published May 18, 2010• 47 citations
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Abstract

We report on an Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiment probing the statistics of microwave photons emitted by a tunnel junction in the shot-noise regime at low temperature. By measuring the cross correlation of the fluctuations of the occupation numbers of the photon modes of both detection branches, we show that while the statistics of electrons is Poissonian, the photons obey chaotic statistics. This is observed even for low photon occupation number when the voltage across the junction is close to hν/e.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.104.206802

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We report on an Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiment probing the statistics of microwave photons emitted by a tunnel junction in the shot-noise regime at low temperature. By measuring the cross correlation of the fluctuations of the occupation numbers of the photon modes of both detection branches, we show that while the statistics of electrons is Poissonian, the photons obey chaotic statistics. This is observed even for low photon occupation number when the voltage across the junction is close to hν/e.
We report the observation of photon pairs in the photoassisted shot noise of a tunnel junction in the quantum regime at very high frequency and very low temperature. We have measured the fluctuations of the noise power generated by the junction at two different frequencies, f(1) = 4.4 and f(2) = 7.2 GHz, while driving the junction with a microwave excitation of frequency f(0) = f(1) + f(2). We observe clear correlations between the fluctuations of the two noise powers even when the mean photon number per measurement is much smaller than one. This is strong evidence for photons being emitted in pairs. We also demonstrate that the electromagnetic field generated by the junction exhibits two-mode amplitude squeezing, a proof of its nonclassicality. The data agree very well with predictions based on the fourth cumulant of the current fluctuations generated by the junction.
We present the first study of the statistics of GHz photons in quantum circuits, using Hanbury Brown and Twiss correlations. The super-Poissonian and Poissonian photon statistics of thermal and coherent sources, respectively, made of a resistor and a radio frequency generator, are measured down to the quantum regime at milli-Kelvin temperatures. As photon correlations are linked to the second and fourth moments of current fluctuations, this experiment, which is based on current cryogenic electronics, may become a standard for probing electron/photon statistics in quantum conductors.
In microwave current noise power measurements, a detector is used which measures the power emitted by the device in the external circuit. This power can be viewed as a flux of (microwave) photons. An interesting question is the nature of the photon statistics associated with the noise power. While for thermal noise one expects classical photon statistics (Bose‐Einstein), recently it has been shown theoretically that shot noise may lead to non‐classical photon statistics. We propose an original cryogenic experimental scheme to characterize the statistics of photons emitted by conductors at GHz frequency. The experiments, a microwave analog of optical Hanbury Brown Twiss photon correlations, is able to distinguish the statistics of the black‐body radiation associated with thermal electronic noise from the statistics of a coherent monochromatic microwave source. The experiments displays the sensitivity required for future investigations of non classical photons emitted by quantum conductors.
The statistics of electron transport in a quantum conductor is affected by fluctuations of its voltage bias. Here, we show experimentally how a third order correlation in the electromagnetic field arises from the noise of a tunnel junction in the microwave domain being modulated by the vacuum fluctuations generated by a resistor at ultralow temperature. This provides a way to measure the vacuum fluctuations experienced by the junction, not offset by the unavoidable noise added by the detection setup.
We describe a microwave photon counter based on the current-biased Josephson junction. The junction is tuned to absorb single microwave photons from the incident field, after which it tunnels into a classically observable voltage state. Using two such detectors, we have performed a microwave version of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiment at 4 GHz and demonstrated a clear signature of photon bunching for a thermal source. The design is readily scalable to tens of parallelized junctions, a configuration that would allow number-resolved counting of microwave photons.