Two-beam light with simultaneous anticorrelations in photon-number fluctuations and sub-Poissonian statistics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how postselection in twin photon beams can produce coupled beams with anticorrelated photon-number fluctuations and sub-Poissonian statistics, highlighting nonclassical properties through experimental and simulated analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining photon-number-resolving postselection with twin beams to generate and analyze nonclassical light with anticorrelations and sub-Poissonian statistics.

Findings

Successful reconstruction of postselected fields from photocount histograms

Observation of anticorrelations in photon-number fluctuations

Detection of sub-Poissonian photon-number statistics

Abstract

Two twin beams with a shared signal beam and separated idler beams are used together with the photon-number-resolving postselection in the signal beam to arrive at two coupled beams with anticorrelations in photon-number fluctuations. Moreover, the beams exhibit the sub-Poissonian photon-number statistics in their marginal distributions under suitable conditions. The postselected fields with the increasing mean photon numbers are reconstructed from the experimental photocount histograms by the maximum likelihood approach. Also a suitable Gaussian fit of both original twin beams and simulation of the postselection process are applied to arrive at the corresponding photon-number distributions. Their nonclassical properties are analyzed by suitable nonclassicality criteria and quantified by the corresponding nonclassicality depths. Determining the appropriate quasi-distributions of integrated intensities with negative values, the performance of different nonclassicality criteria is judged. Properties of the postselected fields reached both by the used and ideal photon-number-resolved detectors are mutually compared.