First-order decomposition of thermal light in terms of a statistical mixture of pulses

Abstract

We investigate the connection between thermal light and coherent pulses, constructing mixtures of single pulses that yield the same first-order, equal-space-point correlation function as thermal light. We present mixtures involving (i) pulses with a Gaussian lineshape and narrow bandwidths, and (ii) pulses with a coherence time that matches that of thermal light. We characterize the properties of the mixtures and pulses. Our results introduce an alternative description of thermal light in terms of multi-frequency coherent states, valid for the description of broadband linear light-matter interactions. We anticipate our results will be relevant to time-resolved measurements that aim to probe the dynamics of systems as if they were excited by natural thermal light.

8 pages, 2 figures, 4 pages supplementary material. Comments welcome

References in corpus (3)

• Does coherence enhance transport in photosynthesis?
• Molecular Response in One-Photon Absorption via Natural Thermal Light vs Pulsed Laser Excitation
• Thermal light cannot be represented as a statistical mixture of single pulses

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