Emergence of super-Poissonian light from indistinguishable single-photon emitters

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates how super-Poissonian light emerges from ensembles of indistinguishable single-photon emitters, revealing new insights into optical coherence at the atomic scale.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental characterization of super-Poissonian statistics arising from multiple indistinguishable emitters, highlighting a new emission regime.

Findings

Super-Poissonian statistics emerge from many indistinguishable emitters.

Coherent contribution of independent atoms to statistical properties.

New regime for generating and controlling optical coherence.

Abstract

The optical interference constitutes a paramount resource in modern physics. At the scale of individual atoms and photons, it is a diverse concept that causes different coherent phenomena. We present the experimental characterization of both coherent and statistical properties of light emitted from ensembles of trapped ions increasing with a number of contributing phase-incoherent independent atomic particles ranging from a single to up to several hundreds. It conclusively demonstrates how super-Poissonian quantum statistics non-trivially arises purely from the finite number of indistinguishable single-photon emitters in the limit of a single detection mode. The achieved new optical emission regime in which these independent atoms contribute coherently to the super-Poissonian statistics provides a new perspective on the emergence of optical coherence at the atomic scale and constitutes a unique toolbox for its generation and control at the most microscopic level.