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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Electromagnetic Hanbury Brown-Twiss phenomenon

Timo Hassinen, Jani Tervo, Tero Setälä, Ari T. Friberg

Published Sep 22, 2011• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We analyze the classic Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect for thermal electromagnetic fields in space-frequency domain. We compare two different approaches and show that the normalized correlation of intensity fluctuations is fully characterized by the spectral electromagnetic degree of coherence, a result analogous to scalar analysis of the effect. Differences between the two approaches are discussed.

DOI
10.1117/12.897119

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We analyze the classic Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect for thermal electromagnetic fields in space-frequency domain. We compare two different approaches and show that the normalized correlation of intensity fluctuations is fully characterized by the spectral electromagnetic degree of coherence, a result analogous to scalar analysis of the effect. Differences between the two approaches are discussed.
The Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect is one of the celebrated phenomenologies of modern physics that accommodates equally well classical (interferences of waves) and quantum (correlations between indistinguishable particles) interpretations. The effect was discovered in the late thirties with a basic observation of Hanbury Brown that radio-pulses from two distinct antennas generate signals on the oscilloscope that wiggle similarly to the naked eye. When Hanbury Brown and his mathematician colleague Twiss took the obvious step to propose bringing the effect in the optical range, they met with considerable opposition as single-photon interferences were deemed impossible. The Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect is nowadays universally accepted and, being so fundamental, embodies many subtleties of our understanding of the wave/particle dual nature of light. Thanks to a novel experimental technique, we report here a generalized version of the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect to include the frequency of the detected light, or, from the particle point of view, the energy of the detected photons. Our source of light is a polariton condensate, that allows high-resolution filtering of a spectrally broad source with a high degree of coherence. In addition to the known tendencies of indistinguishable photons to arrive together on the detector, we find that photons of different colors present the opposite characteristic of avoiding each others. We postulate that fermions can be similarly brought to exhibit positive (boson-like) correlations by frequency filtering.
We compare the Hanbury Brown--Twiss (HBT) and the thermal light ghost imaging schemes in both near and far fields. Both effects arise as a result of the intensity fluctuations of the thermal light and we find that the essential physics behind the two effects is the same. The difference however is that, in the ghost imaging, large number of bits information of an object needs to be treated together, whereas, in the HBT, there is only one bit information required to be obtained. In the HBT experiment far field is used for the purpose of easy detection, while in the ghost image experiment near (or not far) field is used for good quality image.
Unlike the gravitational waves classically generated by moving macroscopic masses, the diffuse backgrounds of gravitons originate most likely from zero-point fluctuations of the gravitational field amplified by the evolution of the space-time curvature. The resulting entangled states lead to specific second-order correlation effects that could be eventually detected. For a quantitative analysis of this empirical expectation we scrutinize the interactions between the cosmic gravitons and the fundamental mode of a quantized electromagnetic field confined inside a closed optical resonator with perfectly-reflecting walls. We show that the Hanbury-Brown Twiss correlations of the photons are insensitive to the degrees of second-order coherence of the gravitons even barring for the exceedingly small couplings of the problem. Since the degree of second-order coherence of the photons does not reflect the correlation properties of the gravitons, the statistical properties of the gravitons (and their super-Poissonian statistics) cannot be inferred, even in principle, from the intensity correlations of the cavity modes.