Theoretical and experimental study of multi-mode thermal states with subtraction of a random number of photons

Abstract

This work is devoted to the theoretical and experimental study of quantum states of light conditionally prepared by subtraction of a random number of photons from the initial multimode thermal state. A fixed number of photons is subtracted from a multimode quantum state, but only a subsystem of a lower number of modes is registered, in which the number of subtracted photons turns out to be a non-fixed random variable. It is shown that the investigation of multiphoton subtracted multimode thermal states provides a direct study of the fundamental quantum-statistical properties of bosons using a simple experimental implementation. The developed experimental setup plays a role of a specific boson lototron, which is based on the fundamental link between the statistics of boson systems and the Polya distribution. It is shown that the calculation of the photon number distribution based on the Polya‟s urn scheme is equivalent to a calculation using statistical weights for boson systems. A mathematical model based on the composition of the Polya distribution and thermal state is developed and verified. The experimental results are in a good agreement with the developed theory.