Bose-Einstein Condensation of Photons versus Lasing and Hanbury Brown-Twiss Measurements with a Condensate of Light

TL;DR

This paper discusses experiments on photon Bose-Einstein condensation in a dye microcavity, highlighting the transition from lasing to condensation and analyzing photon number fluctuations and coherence properties.

Contribution

It presents experimental evidence of photon Bose-Einstein condensation in the grand-canonical ensemble regime, bridging laser physics and quantum statistical mechanics.

Findings

Photon number fluctuations are of the order of the total particle number.

Evidence of Bose-Einstein condensation in the grand-canonical ensemble.

Observation of a transition between laser-like dynamics and condensation.

Abstract

The advent of controlled experimental accessibility of Bose-Einstein condensates, as realized with e.g. cold atomic gases, exciton-polaritons, and more recently photons in a dye-filled optical microcavity, has paved the way for new studies and tests of a plethora of fundamental concepts in quantum physics. We here describe recent experiments studying a transition between laser-like dynamics and Bose-Einstein condensation of photons in the dye microcavity system. Further, measurements of the second-order coherence of the photon condensate are presented. In the condensed state we observe photon number fluctuations of order of the total particle number, as understood from effective particle exchange with the photo-excitable dye molecules. The observed intensity fluctuation properties give evidence for Bose-Einstein condensation occurring in the grand-canonical statistical ensemble regime.