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American Journal of Physics

Coherence and Fluctuations in Light Beams

W. Martienssen, Eberhard A. Spiller

Published Dec 1, 1964• 391 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A quasithermal, quasmonochromatic lamp is described which serves as a highly degenerate light source with adjustable coherence time between 10−5 sec and 1 sec. This lamp is used for several demonstration experiments concerning the relations between coherence and fluctuations: The intensity interferometer of Hanbury Brown and Twiss is applied to measure the correlations between intensity fluctuations. The double slit experiment of Young serves to stress the role of fluctuations for classical interferometry. Interference patterns from two independent quasithermal lamps are presented.

DOI
10.1119/1.1970023

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A quasithermal, quasmonochromatic lamp is described which serves as a highly degenerate light source with adjustable coherence time between 10−5 sec and 1 sec. This lamp is used for several demonstration experiments concerning the relations between coherence and fluctuations: The intensity interferometer of Hanbury Brown and Twiss is applied to measure the correlations between intensity fluctuations. The double slit experiment of Young serves to stress the role of fluctuations for classical interferometry. Interference patterns from two independent quasithermal lamps are presented.
In this experiment, the observation by Hanbury Brown and Twiss that light intensity fluctuations from an extended broadband source are spatially correlated is demonstrated with a quasi-thermal light source. Laser light is used to illuminate a ground glass screen and generate a diffraction pattern, also known as a speckle pattern. The speckle pattern is recorded using an electronic camera and analyzed. Calculated auto-correlations of the intensity fluctuations agree with theoretical results originating from speckle analysis.
Abstract It is shown by a quantum-mechanical treatment that the emission times of photoelectrons at different points illuminated by a plane wave of light are partially correlated, and identical results are obtained by a classical theory in which the photocathode is regarded as a square-law detector of suitable conversion efficiency. It is argued that the phenomenon exemplifies the wave rather than the particle aspect of light and that it may most easily be interpreted as a correlation between the intensity fluctuations at different points on a wavefront which arise because of interference between different frequency components of the light. From the point of view of the corpuscular picture the interpretation is much less straight­forward but it is shown that the correlation is directly related to the so-called bunching of photons which arises because light quanta are mutually indistinguishable and obey Bose-Einstein statistics. However, it is stressed that the use of the photon concept before the light energy is actually detected is highly misleading since, in an interference experiment, the electromagnetic field behaves in a manner which cannot be explained in terms of classical particles. The quantitative predictions of the theory have been confirmed by laboratory experi­ments and the phenomenon has been used, in an interferometer, to measure the apparent angular diameter of Sirius: these results, together with further applications to astronomy, will be discussed in detail in later papers. It is shown that the classical and quantum treatments give identical results when applied to find the fluctuations in the photoemission current produced by a single light beam, and the connexion between these fluctuations and the correlation between photons in coherent beams is pointed out. The results given here are in full agreement with those obtained by Kahn from an analysis based on quantum statistics: however, they differ from those derived on thermodynamical grounds by Fellgett and by Clark Jones and the reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.
In this thesis we investigate, experimentally and theoretically, many classical and quantum coherence effects of the light. Initially we investigate the interference patterns formation by nonlocal double slit using classical light sources and comparing the results with those using a twin photos light source generated by Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion (SPDC). We demonstrate that the classical correlation in wave vectors, in beam splitter outs, is a sufficient condition to the interference pattern to exist. In this work we also investigate experimentally the influence of polarized nonlocal double slit and local double slit. Here is present a alternative Fano based interpretation to explain the reason why the polarization of correlated beam has not influence on pattern fringes. We presented also an investigation about the light source parameters influence on the ghost interference interference. We demonstrate experimentally the relationship between, the coherence and source size, and fringes visibility. We extended the concept of complementarity related to coherence and correlation using the changes of the reference beam coherence and observing it’s influence on the interference patterns of the local double slit. In near-field limit, we investigate the existence of conditionality in the wave vector limited by the aperture of objects placed on the classically correlated beams paths. We demonstrate that is possible to find conditionality between the light emitted through the slits apertures. All these experiments performed using the Brown Twiss intensity interferometer (HBT) served to investigate the difference between the transversal effects with quantum and classical incoherent light. Finally, we demonstrate the first experimental measurement demonstrating the polarization changes on the partially coherent light propagation induced by the coherence source changes. This phenomenom was investigated for the free space propagation and for a nonlinear medium modeled by a Kerr medium.
A third-order double-slit interference experiment with a pseudothermal light source in the high-intensity limit has been performed by actually recording the intensities in three optical paths. It is shown that not only can the visibility be dramatically enhanced compared to the second-order case as previously theoretically predicted and shown experimentally, but also that the higher visibility is a consequence of the contribution of third-order correlation interaction terms, which is equal to the sum of all contributions from second-order correlation. It is interesting that, when the two reference detectors are scanned in opposite directions, negative values for the third-order correlation term of the intensity fluctuations may appear. The phenomenon can be completely explained by the theory of classical statistical optics and is the first concrete demonstration of the influence of the third-order correlation terms.