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Optics Express

Interference from a nonlocal double-slit through one-photon process

Shu Gan, Su-Heng Zhang, Jun Xiong, Kaige Wang

Published Dec 10, 2009• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this paper, we report an interference experiment in which a spatially incoherent light source illuminates two spatially separated apertures, whose superposition at the same place forms a double-slit. The experimental result exhibits a well-defined interference fringe solely through intensity measurements, in agreement with the theoretical analysis by means of the first-order spatial interference of the incoherent light. Consequently, the nonlocal double-slit interference with thermal light should be attributed to the first-order spatial correlation of incoherent field.

DOI
10.1364/oe.17.023672

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In this paper, we report an interference experiment in which a spatially incoherent light source illuminates two spatially separated apertures, whose superposition at the same place forms a double-slit. The experimental result exhibits a well-defined interference fringe solely through intensity measurements, in agreement with the theoretical analysis by means of the first-order spatial interference of the incoherent light. Consequently, the nonlocal double-slit interference with thermal light should be attributed to the first-order spatial correlation of incoherent field.
We propose and perform an interference experiment involving a distributed angular double-slit and the orbital angular momentum (OAM) correlations of thermal light. In the experiment, two spatially separated angular apertures are placed in two correlated light beams generated by splitting the thermal light beam via a beam splitter. The superposition of the two spatially separated slits constitutes an angular double-slit in two-photon measurements. The angular interference pattern of the distributed double-slit is measured even though each beam interacts with a different part of the object. This scheme allows us to discriminate among different angular amplitude objects using a classical incoherent light source. This procedure has potential applications in remote sensing or optical metrology in the OAM domain.
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We propose an incoherent interferometer which can partly modify the spatial correlation property of thermal light. Applying the interferometer to the two-photon double-slit interference with thermal light, we find that the subwavelength interference patterns appear in the intensity correlation not only between two same polarized photons at different positions but also between two orthogonally polarized photons at the same position. The latter can correspond to the two-photon double-slit interference using a two-photon entangled source. Our experimental result suggests that a thermal light source is capable of accomplishing subwavelength lithography technique to surpass the Rayleigh resolution limit.
This article reports a study on a turbulence-free Young's double-slit interferometer. When the environmental turbulence blurs out the classic Young's double-slit interference completely, a two-photon interference pattern is still observable from the measurement of intensity or photon number fluctuation correlation. This two-photon interferometer always produces a turbulence-free interference pattern, when the double-slit interferometer is utilizing both first-order spatially incoherent light and spatially coherent light. This type of two-photon interferometer establishes new capabilities in optical observations and sensing measurements that require high sensitivity and stability.
The high-order intensity correlation function of NNN-photon interference with thermal light observed in a recent experiment [S. Oppel, T. B\"uttner, P. Kok, and J. von Zanthier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 233603 (2012)] is analyzed. The terms in the expansion of the NthN\mathrm{th}Nth-order correlation function are put into three groups. One group contributes a homogeneous background. Both of the other two contribute $(N\ensuremath{-}1)$-fold super-resolving fringes. In principle they correspond to coherent and incoherent superpositions of classical optical fields, respectively. Therefore similar super-resolving fringes can be obtained without intensity-correlation measurements. We report the experimental results of the coherent and incoherent super-resolving diffraction fringes, which are observed directly in the intensity distribution. The $N\ensuremath{-}1$ sources in both the coherent and incoherent cases are set in certain definite positions. In the coherent case, moreover, the phase difference between two adjacent source fields is $\ensuremath{\pi}$. The fringe visibility is unity in the incoherent case, while it decreases as NNN increases in the incoherent case.