Loss of Antibunching

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how external factors like noise, timing jitter, and filtering affect the antibunching property of quantum light, providing analytical insights into the transition from antibunched to thermal or uncorrelated emission.

Contribution

It offers analytical solutions detailing how various external mechanisms cause loss of antibunching in quantum light, with specific focus on emission from two-level systems under different driving regimes.

Findings

Analytical solutions reveal the transition structures from antibunching to thermal or uncorrelated emission.

Filtering introduces complex transition behaviors in photon correlations.

Experimental validation of these transitions would support the theoretical framework.

Abstract

We describe some of the main external mechanisms that lead to a loss of antibunching, i.e., that spoil the character of a given quantum light to deliver its photons separated the ones from the others. Namely, we consider contamination by noise, a time jitter in the photon detection and the effect of frequency filtering (or detection with finite bandwidth). The emission from a two-level system under both incoherent and coherent driving is taken as a particular case of special interest. The coherent case is further separated into its vanishing (Heitler) and high (Mollow) driving regimes. We provide analytical solutions which, in the case of filtering, unveil an unsuspected structure in the transitions from perfect antibunching to thermal (incoherent case) or uncorrelated (coherent case) emission. The experimental observations of these basic and fundamental transitions would provide another compelling evidence of the correctness and importance of the theory of frequency-resolved photon correlations.