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Frontiers in Optics

Shaping the Bunching of Thermal-like Photons at Ultrashort Time Scales

Juan P. Torres, Ari T. Friberg

Published Jan 1, 2012• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We show that the photon bunching effect arising from a broadband thermal-like source can be controlled in the sub-picosecond regime by introducing spectral phase-only masks in one of the arms of a Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometer.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2012.fw5g.4

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We show that the temporal correlations between two light beams arising from a broadband thermal-like source can be controlled in the femtosecond regime. Specifically, by introducing spectral phase-only masks in the path of one of the beams, we show that the timing and strength of the photon correlations can be programmed on demand. This example demonstrates that the interbeam second-order coherence function propagates as a phase-sensitive ultrafast wave packet in the path towards the detectors, and is thus, susceptible to be modified by acting on just one of the beams. For quite some time, it has been thought that this could only happen with sources showing time-energy entanglement. Our work shows that such a property is due to the existence of a certain type of correlation, but not necessarily the entanglement.
Photons emitted by incoherent sources exhibit temporal bunching, a fundamental manifestation of Bose-Einstein statistics first observed by Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT). While intensity correlation measurements originated in astronomy and are now central across quantum technologies, biophysics, and spectroscopy, observing temporal bunching in broadband thermal light remains limited by detector temporal resolution. Conventional approaches - such as streak cameras or optical upconversion - introduce severe trade-offs in efficiency, bandwidth, or setup versatility. Here, we propose and demonstrate a third route: pre-detection temporal magnification of the optical field prior to measuring its intensity autocorrelation function in a conventional HBT setup. Using an electro-optic time lens with a temporal magnification of 660, we resolve the temporal intensity autocorrelation of broadband thermal light generated via non-degenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion with a bandwidth of 250 GHz. This enables direct observation of thermal photon bunching on sub-3.5 picosecond timescales without narrow spectral filtering, establishing pre-detection temporal imaging as a general platform for broadband statistical optics, with applications spanning ultrafast quantum optics, biophysical imaging, and potentially stellar intensity interferometry.
We report on the two-photon superbunching effect of thermal light via constructive multiple two-photon path interference, showing the possibility of controlling the bunching property of thermal light in a linear optical system. By inserting nnn pairs of mutually first-order incoherent optical channels as a cascade into the traditional Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) interferometer, the two-photon bunching peak-to-background ratio of thermal light can be increased by up to $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}1.{5}^{n}$, surpassing the theoretical upper limit of 2 for a traditional HBT interferometer. Experimentally, the ratio was measured to be $2.4\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.1$ when one pair of optical channels was inserted. Such a scheme can be viewed as a prototype of a two-photon grating.