We analyze the second-order photon autocorrelation function g (2) with respect to the photon probability distribution and discuss the generic features of a distribution that result in superthermal photon bunching (g (2) > 2). Superthermal photon bunching has been reported for a number of optical microcavity systems that exhibit processes like superradiance or mode competition. We show that a superthermal photon number distribution cannot be constructed from the principle of maximum entropy, if only the intensity and the second-order autocorrelation are given. However, for bimodal systems an unbiased superthermal distribution can be constructed from second-order correlations and the intensities alone. Our findings suggest modeling superthermal single-mode distributions by a mixture of a thermal and a lasing like state and thus reveal a generic mechanism in the photon probability distribution responsible for creating superthermal photon bunching. We relate our general considerations to a physical system, a (single-emitter) bimodal laser, and show that its statistics can be approximated and understood within our proposed model. Furthermore the excellent agreement of the statistics of the bimodal laser and our model reveal that the bimodal laser is an ideal source of bunched photons, in the sense that it can generate statistics that contain no other features but the superthermal bunching. arXiv:1802.06417v2 [physics.optics]

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Numerical methods for the description of nonequilibrium many-particle quantum systems such as equation of motion techniques often cannot compute the full statistics of observables but only moments of it, such as mean, variance and higher-order moments. We employ here the maximum entropy method to numerically construct unbiased statistics based on the knowledge of moments. We verify the feasibility of the proposed method by numerical simulation of a simple birth-death model for quantum-dot-microcavity lasers, where the full photon and carrier statistics are available for comparison. We show that not only the constructed statistics but also the computed entropy and the Lagrange multipliers, which appear here as a byproduct, provide valuable insight into the physics of the considered system. For example, the entropy reveals that, in contrast to common wisdom, the photon statistics of the microcavity laser above threshold is better described by a Gaussian distribution than by a Poisson distribution. Our approach is general and can be applied to many other systems emerging in physics and related fields.

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