Two-photon anti-correlation in a Hanbury Brown-Twiss type experiment

Eva Zakka-Bajjani, Joseph Dufouleur, P. Roche +2 more

Yaron Bromberg, Yoav Lahini, Eran Small +1 more

Tabish Qureshi, Ushba Rizwan

The Hanbury Brown–Twiss (HBT) effect, at the quantum level, is essentially an interference of one particle with another, as opposed to interference of a particle with itself. Conventional treatments of identical particles encounter difficulties while dealing with entanglement. A recently introduced label-free approach to indistinguishable particles is described, and is used to analyze the HBT effect. Quantum wave-packets have been used to provide a better understanding of the quantum interpretation of the HBT effect. The effect is demonstrated for two independent particles governed by Bose–Einstein or Fermi–Dirac statistics. The HBT effect is also analyzed for pairs of entangled particles. Surprisingly, entanglement has almost no effect on the interference seen in the HBT effect. In the light of the results, an old quantum optics experiment is reanalyzed, and it is argued that the interference seen in that experiment is not a consequence of non-local correlations between the photons, as is commonly believed. Quanta 2017; 6: 61–69.

Alain Aspect

Bin Bai, Yu Zhou, Ruifeng Liu +4 more

From quantum point of view, Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect is a result of constructive-destructive two-photon interference. There should be no Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect if there was no two-photon interference. In this paper, we observed Hanbury Brown- Twiss effect in a specially designed experiment, in which two-photon interference is impossible by keeping only one two-photon probability amplitude in the experimental scheme. However, our experimental results can still be interpreted by Glauber's quantum optical coherence theory. The researches in our paper are helpful to understand the physics of the second-order coherence of light, especially the physics of Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect.

Gordon Baym, Kan Shen

A longstanding goal of Akira Tonomura was to observe Hanbury Brown--Twiss anti-correlations between electrons in a field-emission free electron beam. The experimental results were reported in his 2011 paper with Tetsuji Kodama and Nobuyuki Osakabe [Phys. Rev. A 83, 063616 (2011)]. An open issue in such a measurement is whether the observed anti-correlations arise from quantum statistics, or are simply produced by Coulomb repulsion between electrons. In this paper we describe a simple classical model of Coulomb effects to estimate their effects in electron beam interferometry experiments, and conclude that the experiment did indeed observe quantum correlations in the electron arrrival times.