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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)

High-visibility multi-photon interference for classical light

I. N. Agafonov, Maria V. Chekhova, T. Sh. Iskhakov

Published Jun 1, 2007• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In quantum optics, considerable attention is paid to generating multi-photon states. In numerous attempts to do it, high visibility of higher-order interference is usually recognized as a 'signature' of nonclassical behaviour. Using Young's double-slit scheme, we demonstrate, theoretically and experimentally, that the classical visibility limit of multi-photon interference is quite high: 81.8 % for the third-order interference and 94.4 % for the fourth-order interference.

DOI
10.1109/cleoe-iqec.2007.4386930

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In quantum optics, considerable attention is paid to generating multi-photon states. In numerous attempts to do it, high visibility of higher-order interference is usually recognized as a 'signature' of nonclassical behaviour. Using Young's double-slit scheme, we demonstrate, theoretically and experimentally, that the classical visibility limit of multi-photon interference is quite high: 81.8 % for the third-order interference and 94.4 % for the fourth-order interference.
It is shown theoretically and experimentally that the third-order interference of intensities, which is studied in many works performed in the last decade and is usually attributed to three-photon entanglement, can also be observed for classical light with a high visibility up to 81.8%. The calculations show that classical sources ensure an even higher visibility of the interference pattern up to 94.4% for fourth order intensity interference. Thus, a large visibility of the interference pattern of the third and higher orders cannot be considered an attribute of the nonclassical character of the effect.
We consider possible ways to recognize multi-photon entangled states in experiment. A commonly used technique is to measure higher-order multi-photon correlation functions and their dependence on certain phase delays (multi-photon interference). Theoretically and experimentally, we show that multi-photon interference can have very high visibility for classical sources: up to 81.8% in the three-photon case and up to 94.4% in the four-photon one. Therefore, the visibility of multi-photon interference should not be used as a criterion of multi-photon entangled states generation. Instead, we suggest to characterize multi-photon entanglement by the photon-number dependence of the normalized correlation functions.
Spatial interference of quantum mechanical particles exhibits a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics. A two-mode entangled state of N particles known as N00N state can give rise to non-classical interference. We report the first experimental observation of a three-photon N00N state exhibiting Young's double-slit type spatial quantum interference. Compared to a single-photon state, the three-photon entangled state generates interference fringes that are three times denser. Moreover, its interference visibility of 0.49 ± 0.09 is well above the limit of 0.1 for spatial super-resolution of classical origin.