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Optics Communications

Interference of independent laser beams at the single-photon level: a field-theoretic description

G. S. Agarwal, P. Hariharan

Published Nov 1, 1993• 2 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1016/0030-4018(93)90652-l

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It has been shown that light beams from two independent lasers can produce interference effects at light levels corresponding to the presence, with a high degree of probability, of only one photon in the system. However, the statistical accuracy of earlier experiments performed in the spatial domain has been limited by the fact that individual observations were restricted to very short time intervals, during which only a few photons were registered. This paper describes an experiment performed in the time domain that overcomes these problems and demonstrates interference between two independent laser beams, at the single-photon level, over much longer observation times.
The conditions are examined under which interference effects should be observable in the superposition of two light beams derived from independent sources. The quantum-mechanical description of these effects differs from the classical description principally in that it is necessarily based on expectation values of the light intensity at one or more space-time points. It is shown that pure states of the radiation field which are not energy states give rise to interference effects, but in that case the two beams cannot meaningfully be described as statistically independent. For a realistic description mixed states have to be introduced, when the expectation value of the intensity gives no indication of interference effects. On the other hand, the intensity correlation at two space-time points is a periodic function of the separation of the points and indicates the presence of transient interference effects. The effects become readily observable only when the average photon occupation number of each cell of phase space is appreciably greater than 1, and this explains why laser beams were needed for the experimental observations. It is pointed out that, even in these experiments, each photon may be regarded as interfering only with itself.