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Department of Physics

Understanding correlations in mixed quantum light fields

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in
  • News
  • Cygorek
  • Reiter
Sketch of elements of an optical experiment together with two curves © T. Bracht ​/​ TU Dortmund
A new publication in Optica Quantum by the Reiter and Cygorek groups

Correlation functions are a commonly used tool in quantum optics to characterize light fields.

When a single photon is mixed with laser light, the resulting second-order correlation function can show unexpected behavior, ranging from antibunching to strong bunching. Understanding this transition is not straightforward, as different contributions overlap in the measured signal.

In our recent work, we show how the correlation function of such mixed signals can be decomposed into its individual components. By separating the single-photon, laser, and mixed contributions, and carefully accounting for their normalization, the observed behavior can be consistently explained. This also provides a way to tune the resulting correlation functions.

We further extend the analysis to the third-order correlation function.

Our theoretical results are in good agreement with experimental measurements on a quantum dot, performed QLab Cardiff led by Anthony Bennett.

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