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Journal of the Optical Society of America A

Studying the optical second-order interference pattern formation process with classical light in the photon counting regime

Yangfan He, Jianbin Liu, Songlin Zhang, Wentao Wang, Bin Bai, Mingnan Le, Zhuo Xu

Published Nov 25, 2015• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The formation process of the second-order interference pattern is studied experimentally in the photon counting regime by superposing two independent single-mode continuous-wave lasers. Two-photon interference based on the superposition principle in Feynman's path integral theory is employed to interpret the experimental results. The second-order interference pattern of classical light can be formulated when, with high probability, there are only two photons in the interferometer at one time. The studies are helpful in understanding the second-order interference of classical light in the language of photons. The method and conclusions can be generalized to the third- and higher-order interference of light and interference of massive particles.

DOI
10.1364/josaa.32.002431

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We report an experiment of observation of classical double-slit interference fringes of two-photon interference. In the experiment, a commercial continuous-wave multi-mode F-P laser diode without either mode-locked or frequency-locked is used as the light source, the density of photons is far more than the single-photon level, and the path difference of the long and short paths is far more than the longitudinal coherence length of the laser diode. The temporal stable and clearly visible spatial-distributed pattern, i.e. first-order interference fringes, was observed .Contradict to the prediction of single-photon interference mechanism, the interference happened far beyond the coherence length, the occurrence possibility and time duration of the interference fringes decrease with the reduction of mode number of the LD, and the time difference between the fringes disappearance and the light vanish is equal to the time difference of the two paths. After discussion, we came to the conclusion that the observed phenomena can be understood in time-resolved two-photon interference mechanism. We reveal a new method to perform two-photon first-order interference, and this help to understand the nature of two-photon interference and also can be useful for quantum information science.