A complete characterization of quantum fluctuations in many-body systems is accessible through the full counting statistics. We present an exact computation of statistical properties of light in a basic model of light-matter interaction: a multimode photonic field coupled to a single two-level emitter. We mostly consider an initial coherent state in a given mode and demonstrate how the original Poissonian statistics gets modified because of quantum many-body scattering effects leading to non-Poissonian distributions. We argue that measuring this statistics in a simple quantum optical setup provides an insight into many-body correlation effects with photons.
A complete characterization of quantum fluctuations in many-body systems is accessible through the full counting statistics. We present an exact computation of statistical properties of light in a basic model of light-matter interaction: a multimode photonic field coupled to a single two-level emitter. We mostly consider an initial coherent state in a given mode and demonstrate how the original Poissonian statistics gets modified because of quantum many-body scattering effects leading to non-Poissonian distributions. We argue that measuring this statistics in a simple quantum optical setup provides an insight into many-body correlation effects with photons.
We provide a complete and exact quantum description of coherent light scattering in a one-dimensional multimode transmission line coupled to a two-level emitter. Using a recently developed scattering approach, we discuss transmission properties, the power spectrum, the full counting statistics, and the entanglement entropy of transmitted and reflected states of light. Our approach takes into account spatial parameters of an incident coherent pulse as well as waiting and counting times of a detector. We describe the time evolution of the power spectrum and observe deviations from the Poissonian statistics for reflected and transmitted fields. In particular, the statistics of reflected photons can change from sub-Poissonian to super-Poissonian for increasing values of the detuning, while the statistics of transmitted photons is strictly super-Poissonian in all parametric regimes. We study the entanglement entropy of some spatial part of the scattered pulse and observe that it obeys the area laws and that it is bounded by the maximal entropy of the effective four-level system.
This thesis intends to familiarize the reader with the concepts of photon statistics and correlations in quantum optics. Developing light sources that emit quantum states is central for the realization of quantum technologies. One important step in characterizing these sources is the measurement of field fluctuations and correlations, by coincidence measurements. The expectation value of a coincidence measurement, a simultaneous measurement of two intensities (or, more general, four fields), is represented by the fourth-order correlation function. The value of the correlation function, at zero delay between the detection of two photons, reveals important properties of the state to which they belonged, for example the fluctuations of the photon number. Since predictability is important for many applications, light sources emitting single photons are also characterized by the indistinguishability of consecutively emitted photons, or of two photons from separate emitters. In paper I we investigate blinking behaviour in quantum emitters, and its effect on the interference pattern and photon statistics with photons from two separate emitters. Blinking refers to an emitters transition into a non-emitting state, and subsequent transition back to an emitting state. We show that blinking can not be treated as linear loss, when measuring the fourth-order correlation function for two emitters in a Hong-Ou-Mandel setup. In general, a measurement of the fourth-order correlation function is robust to loss, which makes it a very practical tool. However, the relation between recorded coincidence counts and the correlation function is only direct in the limit of zero detection efficiency, and depends on the detection system. In paper II, we show that by adding a variable attenuation in the beam path, we can trace back to the ''true'' value of the correlation function at zero quantum efficiency. This method improves accuracy in correlation measurements by decreasing a systematic error at the expense of an increased statistical error, which is easier to handle, extending the use of coincidence methods to classical and non-classical multi-photon states.
We study sub-Poissonian photon statistics of light in interaction of a single mode radiation, initially either in a coherent state or in a superposed coherent state with an assembly of two-level atoms using the Hamiltonian, H = ω(a+a + Sz) + g(aS+ + a+ S–) in natural units, where a+ and a are creation and annihilation operators, Sz, S ± are the collective Dicke operators, g is the coupling constant, and ω is the energy of the photons and also the separation between the two atomic levels. We study the cases of (i) a single two-level and (ii) of two two-level atoms interacting with a single mode coherent or superposed coherent radiation. We find that for large coupling time gt, Fano factor shows collapses and revival phenomena, and that the variation is large for small mean number of photons. We also find that in the case of two two-level atoms, photon statistics shows larger sub-Poissonian than the case of a single two-level atom, and that there is no definite relationship between squeezing and sub-Poissonian photon statistics of light.
Collective phenomena in the Tavis-Cummings model has been widely studied, focusing on the phase transition features. In many occasions, it has been used variational approaches that consider separated radiation-matters systems. In this paper, we examine the role of the quantum entanglement of an assembly of two-level emitters coupled to a single-mode cavity; this allows us to characterise the quantum correlated state for each regime. Statistical properties of the system, e.g., the first four statistical moments, show clearly the structure of the light and matter distributions. Even though the second order correlation function goes to one in some regimes, the statistical analysis evidence a sharp departure from coherent behaviour, contrarily to the common understanding.
We present various schemes for measuring the quantum state of a single mode of the electromagnetic field. These involve measuring the photon statistics for the mode before and after an interaction with either one or two two-level atoms. The photon statistics conditioned on the final state of the atoms, for two choices of the initial set of atomic states, along with the initial photon statistics, may be used to calculate the complete quantum state in a simple manner. Alternatively, when one atom is used, two unconditioned sets of photon statistics, each after interaction with a single atom in different initial states, along with the initial photon statistics may be used to calculate the initial state in a simple manner. When the cavity is allowed to interact with just one atom, only pure cavity states which do not contain zeros in the photon distribution may be reconstructed. When two atoms are used we may reconstruct pure states which do not contain adjacent zeros in the photon distribution. Coherent states and number states are among those that may be measured with one-atom interaction, and squeezed states and ‚Schrödinger cats‘ are among those that may be measured with a two-atom interaction.
Strong light-matter coupling enables hybrid states in which photonic and electronic degrees of freedom become correlated even in the ground state. While many-body effects in long-range dispersion interactions are known to reshape electronic properties under such conditions, their impact on quantum-optical observables remains largely unexplored. Here, we address this problem using quantum electrodynamical density-functional theory (QEDFT) combined with the recently developed photon-many-body dispersion (pMBD) functional, which can capture higher-order electron-photon correlations and multi-photon processes. We compute ground-state photonic observables including photon number fluctuations, second-order correlations, and quadrature variances, and find squeezing and super-Poissonian photon statistics emerging from light-matter interactions in the strong coupling regime. Our results demonstrate that capturing the full hierarchy of many-body, electron-photon and multi-photon correlations is essential for a consistent description of quantum-optical properties in strongly coupled molecular systems, establishing QEDFT as a first-principles framework for predicting nonclassical photonic features in the ground state of complex systems.