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Physical Review Letters

Further evidence of nonclassical behavior in optical interference

Z. Y. Ou, L. Mandeļ

Published Jun 19, 1989• 73 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It is demonstrated in a photon coincidence experiment with two photodetectors, in which signal and idler photons produced by parametric down-conversion are allowed to interfere, that the visibility of the interference pattern is well above 50% and remains unchanged when one of the two light beams is attenuated ninefold compared with the other. These results violate classical probability for light waves.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.62.2941

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•Feb 1, 1992•1 citation
It is demonstrated in a photon coincidence experiment with two photodetectors, in which signal and idler photons produced by parametric down-conversion are allowed to interfere, that the visibility of the interference pattern is well above 50% and remains unchanged when one of the two light beams is attenuated ninefold compared with the other. These results violate classical probability for light waves.
A new fourth-order interference experiment has been carried out and analyzed theoretically in classical and in quantum terms. Two photons produced in the process of parametric down-conversion provide the two inputs to a Mach-Zehnder type of interferometer, while two photodetectors coupled to a coincidence counter measure the output. The coincidence rate, after subtraction of accidentals, exhibits a cosine variation with the optical path difference, in agreement with quantum mechanics, but in disagreement with a classical analysis. By contrast, when two coherent light beams from a He:Ne laser are used as inputs to the interferometer, no fourth-order interference is observed.
It is shown that both the visibility V =1/2 predicted for two-photon interference experiments with two independent sources and the visibility V = 1 predicted for two-photon interference experiments with a parametric down-conversion source can be explained in terms of a locally causal, adaptive, corpuscular, classical (non-Hamiltonian) dynamical system. Hence, there is no need to invoke quantum theory to explain the so-called nonclassical effects in the interference of signal and idler photons in parametric down conversion and a revision of the commonly accepted criterion of the nonclassical nature of light is called for.
This chapter discusses two reported experiments in which the interference between signal and idler photons generated in the process of parametric down-conversion were investigated. Although two-photon interference effects have been treated theoretically before, it analyzes the two experiments in some detail to show how differences between the predictions of classical and quantum theories appear. The chapter compares the predictions of classical and quantum theories with the experimental results obtained. As practically all detectors of light rely on the photoelectric effect, in which a free electron is produced at the expense of a photon, the photon annihilation operator plays a key role in describing the measurement of light in the quantum theory. The time correlation between signal and idler photons produced in the parametric down-conversion process was first measured with a resolving time of about 10 nanoseconds. The interference effect can be made the basis of a measurement of the length of a photon wave packet with femtosecond time resolution.
A number of optical experiments in which quantum mechanics is tested and the laws of classical probability are violated will be described. These all make use of the phenomenon in non-linear optics known as parametric down-conversion, in which an incident pump photon effectively splits into two correlated, lower frequency signal and idler photons in an entangled quantum state. We show that two-photon coincidence measurements of signal and idler photons violate classical probability by at least 600 standard deviations. Other measurements involving two down-converters lead to the realization of a ″quantum eraser″ and suggest a reinterpretation of the usual quantum wave function.
Although we tend to think of optical interference as a classical wave phenomenon, recent experiments have revealed a number of effects that are not describable in classical terms. This is particularly true of interference effects involving the detection of a photon pair. We shall refer to them as fourth order interference, on the grounds that the joint probability density for the detection of one photon at r sub 1 at time t and another r sub 2 at time t is proportional to the fourth order correlation function of the field. This probability is readily measured when two photodetectors are positioned at r sub 1 and r sub 2 and the signals from the two detectors are fed to a coincidence counter that registers 'simultaneous' detections by the two detectors in coincidence. The topics covered include: fourth order interference measurements; the Franson experiment; and experimental test of the de Broglie guided wave theory.