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Optics Letters

Effects of pseudothermal light source's transverse size and coherence width in ghost-interference experiments

Itamar Vidal, Dilson P. Caetano, E. J. S. Fonseca, Jandir M. Hickmann

Published Apr 28, 2009• 19 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Ghost interference is experimentally investigated by varying the pseudothermal light source's transverse size and coherence width. Our results show that by increasing the transverse size of the source the quality of the interference pattern is improved, while the visibility is reduced. On the other hand, by increasing the coherence width of the source, the visibility of the interference pattern is improved, while the quality is reduced. These experimental results corroborate previous theoretical results.

DOI
10.1364/ol.34.001450

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Ghost interference is experimentally investigated by varying the pseudothermal light source's transverse size and coherence width. Our results show that by increasing the transverse size of the source the quality of the interference pattern is improved, while the visibility is reduced. On the other hand, by increasing the coherence width of the source, the visibility of the interference pattern is improved, while the quality is reduced. These experimental results corroborate previous theoretical results.
Ghost interference with partially coherent radiation sources is studied using optical coherence theory. The visibility of the ghost interference fringes is strongly influenced by the transverse size and transverse coherence width of the source. An increase of the transverse source size leads to a decrease of the fringes' visibility. An increase of the transverse coherence results in an increase of the visibility. The difference between ghost interference formed with entangled photon pairs and with partially coherent light is discussed.
Ghost interference with entangled photon pairs are studied theoretically. The pump beam in parametric down-conversion is treated as the Gaussian profile, while for the function describing phase matching in the longitudinal direction, both a Gaussian and a sinc function are considered. The numerical results show that the transverse size of the pump beam and transverse coherence width of the parametric fluorescence strongly influence the interference pattern. With the increase of the pump transverse size and the decrease of transverse coherence width, the interference pattern becomes more and more prominent. When the transverse coherence width is small to 0.01 mm category, the Gaussian and sinc models give the same results.
The transverse spatial properties of the twin light beams of the down-conversion have been recently investigated in experiments using double-slit and coincidence measurements. Fringes are obtained, with a controlled degree of visibility, placing the slits in the signal beam and scanning the signal detector [direct interference---Phys. Rev. A 49, 4176 (1994)] and also, for the degenerated type II down-conversion, with slits in the signal beam and scanning the idler detector [ghost interference---Phys. Rev. Lett. 74, 3600 (1995)]. The idea of a ghost source is used to discuss the direct interference experiment. Using a nondegenerated type I down-conversion, experimental results are obtained showing that the visibility of the ghost interference patterns can be controlled by the ghost source size, analogously as it can be done for a real light source. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
Optical intensity correlation offers a promising pathway for achieving spatial interference and coherent diffraction using quasi-monochromatic incoherent radiation. However, the inherent ultrashort coherence time of broadband incoherent sources fundamentally restricts spectral-resolved capability in such correlation-based methodologies. Here, we overcome this limitation by engineering a supercontinuum pseudothermal light source, exhibiting pronounced spatial-spectral intensity correlations. This work endows Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) intensity interferometer and ghost interference experiments with colors. To our best knowledge, we present the first experimental demonstration of multispectral ghost interference, yielding a polychromatic interference pattern via intensity correlation. Furthermore, nondegenerate ghost interference and novel non-local spectral filtering are well demonstrated. The proposed supercontinuum pseudothermal light shows promising spatial-spectral random encoding capabilities and is in good shape for diverse intensity correlation-aided applications, such as correlation hyperspectral imaging.
A scheme for fourth-order double-slit ghost interference with a pseudo-thermal light source is proposed. It is shown that not only can the visibility be dramatically enhanced compared to the third-order case, but also higher resolution is demonstrated if we scan two of three reference detectors in opposite directions with the same speed, meanwhile another two in identical directions where the speed of one reference detector is twice the other. The results show that the visibility and resolution improvement of the fourth-order ghost interference fringe can be applied to the N th-order ghost imaging.