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Journal of the Optical Society of America A

Accuracy of approximate photocount statistics of mixtures of chaotic and coherent radiation

Z. Hradil, Jan Peřina

Published Aug 1, 1986• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We discuss the validity and accuracy of onefold approximate photocount statistics of mixtures of chaotic and coherent radiation. We determine the relative error for factorial cumulants and moments between approximate and exact solutions for heterodyne detection. It is shown how the accuracy increases as the signal-to-noise ratio grows. Other generalizations of the approximation approach can be made to improve the coincidence between the exact and approximate solutions, but their usefulness is limited. Some numerical results are obtained when the chaotic line shape is Lorentzian.

DOI
10.1364/josaa.3.001328

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We discuss the validity and accuracy of onefold approximate photocount statistics of mixtures of chaotic and coherent radiation. We determine the relative error for factorial cumulants and moments between approximate and exact solutions for heterodyne detection. It is shown how the accuracy increases as the signal-to-noise ratio grows. Other generalizations of the approximation approach can be made to improve the coincidence between the exact and approximate solutions, but their usefulness is limited. Some numerical results are obtained when the chaotic line shape is Lorentzian.
A method for computing the approximate photocount statistics for Gaussian light is presented. This method may be used for the superposition of coherent radiation with chaotic radiation of arbitrary spectral shape. Data is presented for Gaussian-, triangular-, and square-shaped spectra as well as for Lorentzian-shaped spectra. The results show that the photocount statistics are significantly dependent upon spectral shape for intermediate time-bandwidth products. The results also show that the Bedard, Chang, and Mandel approximation gives a better fit to a Gaussian-shaped spectrum then to a Lorentzian-shaped spectrum. Significant differences between the photocount statistics for a time-bandwidth product of 10 and Poisson statistics were also obtained; even for a signal-to-noise ratio of 40:1.
In recent years there has been considerable utilization of photocount statistics for studying theoretical and experimental properties of a quantized electromagnetic field. The electromagnetic field, which has been of greatest interest in these areas, is a superposition of coherent and chaotic radiation. In this paper closed-form recurrence equations are derived for the photocount distribution and the factorial moments for this case. The photocount distribution is then obtained by using a well-known solution for p(0, T), and the factorial moments are generated by using the fact that the zeroth factorial moment is unity.
Recently derived formulae for the integrated intensity distribution, the photon-counting distribution and its factorial moments in the statistics of the superposition of coherent and chaotic multimode fields are proposed as approximate formulae for light of arbitrary spectrum. It is shown by explicit calculations of the third factorial moment for the superposition of a one-mode coherent field with a Gaussian-Lorentzian field that the proposed formulae hold with good accuracy over a wide range of conditions. An application to the determination of spectral parameters of light is given.
There has been considerable interest in recent years in the statistical properties of optical frequency electromagnetic fields. Of particular interest is the study of photon bunching and the probability density for waiting time between adjacent photocounts. In this paper we derive an expression for the probability density of the time interval distribution as well as some other quantities of interest in photon bunching for the case where the incident radiation is comprised of superposed coherent and chaotic radiation of arbitrary spectral shapes. Calculations show that the key parameters are the average number of chaotic counts per coherence time and the ratio of the strengths of coherent and chaotic parts (signal-to-noise ratio).
Statistical properties such as the cumulants, and the central, factorial, and ordinary moments are obtained for photocounting distributions when the incident radiation is intensity-modulated with arbitrary statistics. The results are applied in some detail to the cases of triangular, sinusoidal, and square-wave modulation of multimode superposed coherent and chaotic radiation. The coefficient of variation, skewness, and kurtosis are obtained as a function of modulation depth. Comparison is made with experimental data in the cases of triangular and sinusoidal modulation of a laser source.
We consider onefold photoelectron-counting statistics, for arbitrary counting times, when the wave field on the detector is a mixture of thermal light of a specified spectral profile (incoherent component) and a harmonic signal (coherent component). The probability density function of the time-integrated intensity W(Ω) is obtained from the inverse Laplace transform of the moment-generating function by the Dubner–Abate algorithm. The corresponding probability distribution of the detected photoelectrons, P(m), is then evaluated directly by numerical integration of W(Ω). Numerical results for W(Ω) and P(m) have been obtained when the thermal line shape is Lorentzian for both the homodyne situation (coherent line coincides with the mean frequency of the thermal spectral profile) and the heterodyne situation (coherent line is now off center with respect to the mean frequency of the thermal spectral profile).