Correlations for subsets of particles in symmetric states: what photons are doing within a beam of light when the rest are ignored

Abstract

Given a state of light, how do its properties change when only some of the constituent photons are observed and the rest are neglected (traced out)? By developing formulas for mode-agnostic removal of photons from a beam, we show how the expectation value of any operator changes when only q photons are inspected from a beam, ignoring the rest. We use this to re-express expectation values of operators in terms of the state obtained by randomly selecting q photons. Remarkably, this only equals the true expectation value for a unique value of q: expressing the operator as a monomial in normally ordered form, q must be equal to the number of photons annihilated by the operator. A useful corollary is that the coefficients of any q-photon state chosen at random from an arbitrary state are exactly the qth-order correlations of the original state; one can inspect the intensity moments to learn what any random photon will be doing and, conversely, one need only look at the n-photon subspace to discern what all of the nth-order correlation functions are. The astute reader will be pleased to find no surprises here, only mathematical justification for intuition. Our results hold for any completely symmetric state of any type of particle with any combination of numbers of particles and can be used wherever bosonic correlations are found.