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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America

Interference of laser modes: observations at the single-photon level

P. Hariharan, Nick Brown, Barry C. Sanders, Ichiro Fujima

Published Jan 1, 1993• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The accuracy of earlier experiments on the interference of independent laser beams at the single-photon level has been limited by the very short observation times. We have overcome this problem by observing the beats produced by the two orthogonally polarized modes from a frequency-stabilized transverse Zeeman laser.
DOI
10.1364/oam.1993.wxx.10

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It has been shown that light beams from two independent lasers can produce interference effects at light levels corresponding to the presence, with a high degree of probability, of only one photon in the system. However, the statistical accuracy of earlier experiments performed in the spatial domain has been limited by the fact that individual observations were restricted to very short time intervals, during which only a few photons were registered. This paper describes an experiment performed in the time domain that overcomes these problems and demonstrates interference between two independent laser beams, at the single-photon level, over much longer observation times.
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.
Some very interesting pure non-Gaussian states in quantum optics have already been produced experimentally (with one pulsed laser): the single-photon-added coherent states, among others. Important interference phenomena by superposing beams from two independent masers or lasers have been investigated earlier experimentally and theoretically. By pursuing on both subjects altogether, we propose a possible new experiment to generate single-photon-added coherent states, by employing two independent laser sources, both in continuous regime and having approximately equal frequencies and coherence times tc: we expect that such generations could occur during times of the order of tc/3 (possibly, a bit shorter). This expectation follows from a fully quantized multimode analysis of the temporal mode structure, which extends previous studies of parametric down conversion and balanced homodyne detection
Interference fringes produced by the superposition of light beams from two independent lasers have been investigated under conditions where the light flux was so low that one photon was usually received at the detector before the next one was emitted by one or the other source. Because the average number of photons detected in each observation was only about 10, a photon correlation technique was used to demonstrate the presence of interference fringes. The measurement procedure was automated, and this led to much greater statistical accuracy than was previously reported. The effect of varying the observation time and the number of interference fringes sampled was investigated, and found to be in good agreement with theory.
Interference effects produced by the superposition of the light beams from two independent single-mode lasers have been investigated experimentally. It is found that interference takes place even under conditions in which the light intensities are so low that, with high probability, one photon is absorbed before the next one is emitted by one or the other source. Since the average number of registered photons per trial was only about 10, photon correlation techniques were required to demonstrate the interference. The interpretation of the experiment, and the question whether it demonstrates interference between two photons, are discussed.