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Bunching, Unbunching, and Antibunching of Light

Partha Pratim Mondal

Published May 25, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Light exists in many different forms that exhibit surprising properties. These properties can be harnessed to understand fundamental processes associated with subtle effects of light and help develop new kinds of devices capable of making high-precision measurements. To understand the different forms of light, there are two major theoretical frameworks: (1) semiclassical theory and (2) complete quantum theory. Although semiclassical theory offers simplicity, it does not account for quantum behavior, whereas quantum theory is capable of explaining almost all the existing forms of light including bunching, anti-bunching, and their variants. Such light is known to exhibit distributions that are not Poisson in nature and can exhibit sub- and super-Poisson behavior. In this chapter, we will also briefly discuss how to generate these unusual forms of light.

DOI
10.1063/9780735424517_009

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Light exists in many different forms that exhibit surprising properties. These properties can be harnessed to understand fundamental processes associated with subtle effects of light and help develop new kinds of devices capable of making high-precision measurements. To understand the different forms of light, there are two major theoretical frameworks: (1) semiclassical theory and (2) complete quantum theory. Although semiclassical theory offers simplicity, it does not account for quantum behavior, whereas quantum theory is capable of explaining almost all the existing forms of light including bunching, anti-bunching, and their variants. Such light is known to exhibit distributions that are not Poisson in nature and can exhibit sub- and super-Poisson behavior. In this chapter, we will also briefly discuss how to generate these unusual forms of light.
Abstract This third edition, like its two predecessors, provides a detailed account of the basic theory needed to understand the properties of light and its interactions with atoms, in particular the many nonclassical effects that have now been observed in quantum-optical experiments. The earlier chapters describe the quantum mechanics of various optical processes, leading from the classical representation of the electromagnetic field to the quantum theory of light. The later chapters develop the theoretical descriptions of some of the key experiments in quantum optics. Over half of the material in this third edition is new. It includes topics that have come into prominence over the last two decades, such as the beamsplitter theory, squeezed light, two-photon interference, balanced homodyne detection, travelling-wave attenuation and amplification, quantum jumps, and the ranges of nonliner optical processes important in the generation of nonclassical light. The book is written as a textbook, with the treatment as a whole appropriate for graduate or postgraduate students, while earlier chapters are also suitable for final- year undergraduates. Over 100 problems help to intensify the understanding of the material presented.
Abstract In the present paper the attributes of nonclassical light with respect to the theoretical basis, the experimental verification, and the applications are discussed and compared. If one ore more of the corresponding statistical measures (fluctuation excess, bunching excess, Poisson excess) attain negative values, surprising new properties of photon states occur. The analysis shows that under certain temporal and interaction conditions squeezing, antibunching, and sub‐Poisson behavior can accompany one or more of the other attributes. Also the connection of the attributes with the Glauber‐Sudarshan P‐representation of the corresponding states is studied and yields important assertions.
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
We analyze the most popular approaches to photon antibunching as exemplified in a sim-ple model of second-harmonic generation. We find the exact evolution of the fundamental and harmonic fields for initial Fock states with small photon numbers. We show explicitly that definitions of photon antibunching based on the unnormalized, G(2)(t, t′), and normal-ized, g(2)(t, t′), two-time correlation functions describe distinct phenomena for nonstationary fields. For completeness, we also compare antibunching effects defined by the two-time and single-time correlations. 1 Photon antibunching Photon antibunching and sub-Poisson photon statistics (also called antibunching) reveal the quan-tum nature of light and therefore have received a great deal of attention during the last decades. The first detection of antibunched light by Kimble, Dagenais and Mandel [1] and first detection of sub-Poisson light by Short and Mandel [2] are regarded as milestones in the progress in quantum optics. In spite of many experimental and theoretical achievements, a deeper analysis of these effects seems to be necessary, particularly in the case of nonstationary fields. We shall clarify some of these aspects by referring to an example of second-harmonic generation. There are several commonly used definitions of photon antibunching for a single-mode radiation field (e.g., Refs. [1]–[9]): Definition I: The photon antibunching (see, e.g., Ref. [3]) occurs if the two-time light intensity correlation function G(2)(t, t+ τ) increases from its initial value at τ = 0,