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Physics Bulletin

Photon Bunching and Antibunching

R. Loudon

Published Jan 1, 1976• 51 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Antibunching of photons is one of the few phenomena which can only be explained in terms of the quantum theory of light. Rodney Loudon describes this effect, and its more widely known counterpart, photon bunching
DOI
10.1088/0031-9112/27/1/023

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Previous work on the two-time photon-number correlations of quantum non-stationary fields has focused on the demonstration of self-contradictory predictions of the photon antibunching according to different definitions. In this paper we analyse the usefulness of the conventional and generalized definitions of photon bunching in a description of classical non-stationary light. It is proved that the generalized definition applied to classical fields predicts photon bunching but never antibunching. In contrast, the two conventional definitions are shown to improperly classify certain classical non-stationary fields as being antibunched.

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Being bosons, photons like to group together, with the behavior of photon bunching described as an attribute of classical light. At the other extreme, photons emitted by a single emitter are expected to antibunch, trickling out of the emitter one at a time. Although bunching and antibunching are well established behaviors of classical and nonclassical light, respectively, the transition between the two has not been observed. It is expected that as the number of emitters is increased, a smooth transition should occur. Using a high-quality cavity into which they can place a variable number of atoms, Hennrich et al. show that they can probe the transition systematically as the number of emitters (atoms in the cavity) is gradually increased. They observe that the antibunching behavior disappears when the average number of atoms in the cavity is one, and they are able to explain the experimental data well if the emitters are assumed to form an independent ensemble. — ISO
When a photon beam from a light source is split in two, with one part transmitted and the other reflected at a half-silvered mirror, it is found that the intensities of these beams are correlated: the photons exhibit "bunching," that is, they tend to come in clusters of identical particles occupying the same state. In contrast, electrons are expected to exhibit "antibunching" and therefore a negative intensity correlation. Büttiker (page 275) discusses two successful measurements of such antibunching of fermions in mesoscopic conductors (Henny et al., page 296, and Oliver et al., page 299) and explains why their approach is important for investigating a range of subjects from superconductivity to noise suppression in quantum computing.
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.
Previous work on the two-time photon-number correlations of quantum non-stationary fields has focused on the demonstration of self-contradictory predictions of the photon antibunching according to different definitions. In this paper we analyse the usefulness of the conventional and generalized definitions of photon bunching in a description of classical non-stationary light. It is proved that the generalized definition applied to classical fields predicts photon bunching but never antibunching. In contrast, the two conventional definitions are shown to improperly classify certain classical non-stationary fields as being antibunched.