Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields”
Name
Shapiro-2012-Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields.pdf
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85.64 KB
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Author(s)
Shapiro, Jeffrey H.
Lantz, Eric
Date Issued
May 2012
Journal
Physical Review A
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Shapiro, Jeffrey, and Eric Lantz. “Comment on ‘Observation of Anticorrelation in Incoherent Thermal Light Fields’.” Physical Review A 85.5 (2012). ©2012 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Recently, Chen et al. [ Phys. Rev. A 84 033835 (2011)] reported observation of anticorrelated photon coincidences in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer whose input light came from a mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser that had been rendered spatially incoherent by passage through a rotating ground-glass diffuser. They provided a quantum-mechanical explanation of their results, which ascribes the anticorrelation to two-photon interference. They also developed a classical-light treatment of the experiment and showed that it was incapable of explaining the anticorrelation behavior. Here we show that semiclassical photodetection theory, i.e., classical electromagnetic fields plus photodetector shot noise, does indeed explain the anticorrelation found by Chen et al. The key to our analysis is properly accounting for the disparate time scales associated with the laser's pulse duration, the speckle-correlation time, the interferometer's differential delay, and the duration of the photon-coincidence gate. Our result is consistent with the long-accepted dictum that laser light which has undergone linear-optical transformations is classical-state light, so that the quantum and semiclassical theories of photodetection yield quantitatively identical results for its measurement statistics. The interpretation provided by Chen et al. for their observations implicitly contradicts that dictum.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.85.057801
