Superthermal photon bunching in terms of simple probability distributions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which superthermal photon bunching occurs, showing that bimodal systems can produce such statistics through a mixture model, and applies this to a bimodal laser system.

Contribution

It introduces a simple probabilistic model explaining superthermal photon bunching in bimodal systems, linking theory with experimental laser statistics.

Findings

Superthermal photon bunching cannot be derived from maximum entropy with only intensity and $g^{(2)}$.

Bimodal systems can produce superthermal distributions from second-order correlations and intensities.

Bimodal lasers can serve as ideal sources of superthermal bunched photons.

Abstract

We analyze the second-order photon autocorrelation function $g^{(2)}$ with respect to the photon probability distribution and discuss the generic features of a distribution that result in superthermal photon bunching ($g^{(2)}>2$). Superthermal photon bunching has been reported for a number of optical microcavity systems that exhibit processes like superradiance or mode competition. We show that a superthermal photon number distribution cannot be constructed from the principle of maximum entropy, if only the intensity and the second-order autocorrelation are given. However, for bimodal systems an unbiased superthermal distribution can be constructed from second-order correlations and the intensities alone. Our findings suggest modeling superthermal single-mode distributions by a mixture of a thermal and a lasing like state and thus reveal a generic mechanism in the photon probability distribution responsible for creating superthermal photon bunching. We relate our general considerations to a physical system, a (single-emitter) bimodal laser, and show that its statistics can be approximated and understood within our proposed model. Furthermore the excellent agreement of the statistics of the bimodal laser and our model reveal that the bimodal laser is an ideal source of bunched photons, in the sense that it can generate statistics that contain no other features but the superthermal bunching.