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Physical Review Research

Measurement of intensity and polarization beatings in the interference of independent optical fields

Andriy Shevchenko, Tero Setälä

Published Mar 5, 2020• 3 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this work, interference of independent polychromatic waves with different center frequencies and polarizations is studied experimentally using intensity interferometry and two-photon detection. The intensity and polarization beatings of such interfering waves depend on the wave spectra and fluctuation statistics. The authors introduce an experimental technique to characterize the beating harmonicity time and the randomness of the polarization beating for light beams obeying Gaussian and/or Poissonian statistics.

DOI
10.1103/physrevresearch.2.012053

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In this work, interference of independent polychromatic waves with different center frequencies and polarizations is studied experimentally using intensity interferometry and two-photon detection. The intensity and polarization beatings of such interfering waves depend on the wave spectra and fluctuation statistics. The authors introduce an experimental technique to characterize the beating harmonicity time and the randomness of the polarization beating for light beams obeying Gaussian and/or Poissonian statistics.
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Recently some novel two-photon interference experiments have been performed, where quantities such as the field coherence time and the beat spacing between light beams with different frequencies were measured with high time resolution1. These experiments have overcome the traditional limits on time resolution by combining a Mach-Zehnder interferometer configuration with the two-photon correlation technique. All of these experiments, however, have been performed with cw light sources, and no attempt has yet been made to measure the temporal variation of the field intensity.
Interference of light fields, first postulated by Young, is one of the fundamental pillars of physics. Dirac extended this observation to the quantum world by stating that each photon interferes only with itself. A precondition for interference to occur is that no welcher-weg information labels the paths the photon takes; otherwise, the interference vanishes. This remains true, even if two-photon interference is considered, e.g., in the Hong-Ou-Mandel-experiment. Here, the two photons interfere only if they are indistinguishable, e.g., in frequency, momentum, polarization, and time. Less known is the fact that two-photon interference and photon indistinguishability also determine the photon statistics in the overlapping light fields of two independent sources. As a consequence, measuring the photon statistics in the far field of two independent sources reveals the degree of indistinguishability of the emitted photons. In this Letter, we prove this statement in theory using a quantum mechanical treatment. We also demonstrate the outcome experimentally with a simple setup consisting of two statistically independent thermal light sources with adjustable polarizations. We find that the photon statistics vary indeed as a function of the polarization settings, the latter determining the degree of welcher-weg information of the photons emanating from the two sources.