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Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics Letters

Classical visibility limit for three-photon interference

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

Published Jun 1, 2007• 4 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1134/s0021364007080073

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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE•Jun 15, 2007•0 citations
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.
Difference-phase (or Hanbury Brown--Twiss type) intensity interference of classical light is considered in higher orders in the intensity. It is shown that, while the visibility of sum-phase (NOON-type) interference for classical sources drops with the order of interference, the visibility of difference-phase interference has opposite behavior. For three-photon and four-photon interference of two coherent sources, the visibility can be as high as 81.8% and 94.4%, respectively. High-visibility three-photon and four-photon interference of space-time and polarization types has been observed in experiment, for both coherent and pseudothermal light.
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.