Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields”
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 diffus...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
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American Physical Society
2012
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71714 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6094-5861 |
| _version_ | 1826189224873820160 |
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| author | Shapiro, Jeffrey H. Lantz, Eric |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Shapiro, Jeffrey H. Lantz, Eric |
| author_sort | Shapiro, Jeffrey H. |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:11:29Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/71714 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | en_US |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T08:11:29Z |
| publishDate | 2012 |
| publisher | American Physical Society |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/717142022-09-30T08:11:15Z Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields” Shapiro, Jeffrey H. Lantz, Eric Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics Shapiro, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Jeffrey H. 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. United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Information in a Photon Program (Grant No. W911NF-10-1-0404) 2012-07-19T20:18:01Z 2012-07-19T20:18:01Z 2012-05 2011-10 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 1050-2947 1094-1622 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71714 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 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6094-5861 en_US http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.85.057801 Physical Review A Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. application/pdf American Physical Society APS |
| spellingShingle | Shapiro, Jeffrey H. Lantz, Eric Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields” |
| title | Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields” |
| title_full | Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields” |
| title_fullStr | Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields” |
| title_full_unstemmed | Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields” |
| title_short | Comment on “Observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields” |
| title_sort | comment on observation of anticorrelation in incoherent thermal light fields |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/71714 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6094-5861 |
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