Photon bunching in parametric down-conversion with continuous wave excitation
arXiv:0810.4785 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.79.063846
Abstract
The first direct measurement of photon bunching (g2 correlation function) in one output arm of a spontaneous-parametric-down-conversion source operated with a continuous pump laser in the single-photon regime is demonstrated. The result is in agreement with the statistics of a thermal field of the same coherence length, and shows the feasibility of investigating photon statistics with compact cw-pumped sources. Implications for entanglement-based quantum cryptography are discussed.
7 pages, 4 figures, expanded introduction and experimental details added. Accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.A