Experimental observation of three-photon superbunching with classical light in a linear system

Abstract

Three-photon superbunching is experimentally observed with the recently proposed superbunching pseudothermal light. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that three-photon superbunching is observed in linear optical system. From the quantum optics point of view, three-photon superbunching is interpreted as the result of constructive-destructive threephoton interference. The key to observe three-photon superbunching in superbunching pseudothermal light is that all the different ways to trigger a three-photon coincidence count are in principle indistinguishable, which is experimentally guaranteed by putting a pinhole before each rotating groundglass to ensure that all the passed photons are within one coherence area. The observed three-photon superbunching is helpful to increase the visibility of ghost imaging and understand the physics of third-order interference of light.

Two-photon superbunching effect of broadband chaotic stationary light at femtosecond timescale based on cascaded Michelson interferometer

“…Since Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) first observed the two-photon bunching effect in 1956 [1][2][3], it is well known that the degree of second-order coherence (DSOC) of thermal light equals 2 for all kinds of thermal light [4][5][6], including blackbody radiation [7][8][9], broadband amplified spontaneous emission [10][11][12][13], pseudothermal light [14][15][16] and so on. Although superbunching effect of pseudothermal light has been observed [17][18][19][20], to the best of our knowledge, the superbunching effect of broadband chaotic light has never been observed. The reason is that one can not artificially generate extra intensity fluctuations in true chaotic light field like in pseudothermal light case, and also the superbunching effect of true chaotic light itself is difficult to detect due to its femtosecond timescale coherence time.…”

Simple and efficient way to generate superbunching pseudothermal light

“…4(a) along the direction of 𝑡 2 = 𝑡 3 . The empty squares are experimental data and solid lines are theoretical fittings [30]. The ratio between the peak and background of the measured TC in Fig.…”

Non-Rayleigh photon statistics of superbunching pseudothermal light

“…[28] In our early research, we mainly focused on studying the degree of second-and higher-order coherence of superbunching pseudothermal light. [16][17][18]29] The study on the photon statistics of superbunching pseudothermal light is missing, which contains more information about the properties of light than the second-and higher-order degree of coherence. In this paper, we will study the photon statistics of superbunching pseudothermal light in detail, which is helpful to understand the properties of this newly proposed light.…”