Thermal biphotons
arXiv:2008.10636 · doi:10.1063/5.0085342
Abstract
The observation of the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect with thermal light marked the birth of quantum optics. All the thermal sources considered to date did not feature quantum signatures of light, as they consisted of independent emitters that emit uncorrelated photons. Here, we propose and demonstrate an incoherent light source based on phase-randomized spatially entangled photons, which we coin thermal biphotons. We show that in contrast to thermal light, the width of the HBT peak for thermal biphotons is determined by their correlations, leading to violation of the Siegert relation and breakdown of the speckle-fluctuations interpretation. We further provide an alternative interpretation of the results by drawing a connection between the HBT effect and coherent backscattering of light. Finally, we discuss the role of spatial entanglement in the observed results, deriving a relation between the Schmidt number and the degree of violation of the Siegert relation under the double-Gaussian approximation of spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC). Our work reflects new insights on the coherence properties of thermal light in the presence of entanglement, paving the way for entanglement certification using disorder averaged measurements.
References in corpus (20)
- Correlated imaging, quantum and classical
- Ghost imaging with a single detector
- Analysis and interpretation of high transverse entanglement in optical parametric down conversion
- Spatial correlations in parametric down-conversion
- Entanglement Certification From Theory to Experiment
- Measurements in two bases are sufficient for certifying high-dimensional entanglement
- Unified Theory of Ghost Imaging with Gaussian-State Light
- Imaging Through Noise With Quantum Illumination
- High-Dimensional Pixel Entanglement: Efficient Generation and Certification
- Low-loss high-speed speckle reduction using a colloidal dispersion
- Diffraction-limited plenoptic imaging with correlated light
- Real-time shaping of entangled photons by classical control and feedback
- Spatially-entangled Photon-pairs Generation Using Partial Spatially Coherent Pump Beam
- Two-photon speckle as a probe of multi-dimensional entanglement
- The influence of pump coherence on the generation of position-momentum entanglement in down-conversion
- Quantum versus classical effects in two-photon speckle patterns
- Two-photon imaging assisted by a dynamic random medium
- Computational Ghost Imaging
- Hanburry Brown and Twiss, Hong Ou and Mandel effects and other landmarks in Quantum Optics: from photons to atoms
- Speckle statistics of entangled photons