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Journal of Physics A Mathematical and General

The production of photon antibunching by two-photon absorption

I M Every

Published Jul 1, 1975• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The two-photon absorption process is, in principle, capable of producing photon beams with second-order coherence less than unity. The dependence of the observability of such values on the initial state of the beam, the absorption path length and the detector sensitivity is outlined. It is concluded that the main problem is not the low intensity involved but rather the low two-photon absorption cross section.

DOI
10.1088/0305-4470/8/7/003

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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America•Jan 1, 1990•1 citation
The two-photon absorption process is, in principle, capable of producing photon beams with second-order coherence less than unity. The dependence of the observability of such values on the initial state of the beam, the absorption path length and the detector sensitivity is outlined. It is concluded that the main problem is not the low intensity involved but rather the low two-photon absorption cross section.
The effects of two-photon absorption from a single beam of light on the statistical properties of the beam are considered. Simple expressions are obtained for the initial rates of change and limiting steady-state values of the mean photon number and degree of second-order coherence of the beam. The general time dependences of these properties of the light and of the complete photon probability distribution are evaluated for several initial types of beam. The physical significance of the results is described, and their relationship to calculations which use a classical representation of the light is discussed.
A different way of producing antibunched light was experimentally demonstrated in which the production process is difficult to understand by a naive photon picture. A degenerate beam of down-converted photon pairs from a nonlinear crystal pumped by pulsed light was mixed with coherent local oscillator pulses by a beam splitter, and the intensity autocorrelation of one of the output beams was measured. It showed two-photon interference fringes as the phase difference of the two input fields was varied, and showed antibunching when the interference was destructive. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.
A review is given of recent theoretical studies devoted to the problem of generating radiation fields that exhibit the opposite of the well-known bunching of photons observed in light from thermal sources, the so-called antibunching effect. It is made clear that this phenomenon reflects the corpuscular nature of light and, hence, cannot be interpreted in terms of classical electrodynamics, needing, instead, the quantum-mechanical formalism for its description. It is shown in some detail that nonlinear interaction mechanisms like multiphoton absorption and parametric three-wave interaction are suited to change the photon statistical properties of incident (in most cases coherent) light such that the output field will be endowed with antibunching properties. Special emphasis is given to the problem of correctly specifying the dimensions of the mode volume occurring in the usual single-mode treatment of the field, which is, in fact, of great practical interest, since the magnitude of the antibunching effect is determined by the inverse average number of photons contained in that volume. In a later section it is pointed out that destructive interference with a coherent reference beam provides a means of (a) effectively enhancing photon antibunching that is already present in a high-intensity field, through reduction of the intensity, and (b) transforming phase fluctuations produced in a Kerr medium into antibunching-type intensity fluctuations. On the other hand, there exists a way of directly generating light with antibunching properties, the physical mechanism being resonance fluorescence from a single atom. The main features of this technique, both theoretical and experimental, are outlined, including a discussion of the first experimental results obtained a few years ago.
A model of two photon absorption in a cavity with an external driving field is presented. Phase and amplitude fluctuations in the driving field are taken into account to model a partially coherent multimode source. The photon statistics of the light in the cavity are investigated through a calculation of the second-order correlation function of the light field in the steady state. For a coherent driving field the field inside the cavity will exhibit photon antibunching for low intensities. As the fluctuations in the driving field are increased the photon antibunching is lost. For a particular coherent field, g (2) (0) is reduced with increasing laser intensity. This reduction with laser intensity is slower with increasing laser amplitude fluctuations. This could provide a possible explanation for the recent experimental observations of Kransinski and Dinev (1976).
The familiar input-output relations for an optical beam splitter are generalized to allow for linear absorption by the medium forming the mirror. Beam-splitter losses generally affect the noise levels detectable in experiments involving nonclassical light. When employed to investigate two-photon interference effects, a lossy beam splitter can lead to apparent nonlinear absorption, which, in the most extreme case, leads to either both or neither of the photons being absorbed. The degree of second-order coherence of antibunched light can be maintained on transmission through the beam splitter but any amplitude squeezing in the incident light is degraded.
Normally, the signal and idler photons produced in the process of parametric down- conversion exhibit no second-order interference. However, in the presence of an external laser beam that follows the path of the signal photon and induces stimulated down-conversions, one would expect coherence to develop between the down-converted signal and idler beams. We have demonstrated the existence of this phenomenon in an experiment with two down-converters pumped by similar pump beams, in which two mutually coherent laser beams followed the paths of the two down-converted signal photons and induced coherence between the two down- converted idler beams. The induced coherence gives rise to observable interference effects, which are presented.