Phase Dependent Hanbury-Brown and Twiss effect

TL;DR

This paper introduces a phase-sensitive extension of the Hanbury-Brown and Twiss effect, enabling measurement of the complete complex second-order coherence function for improved astronomical imaging and remote sensing.

Contribution

It presents a novel interferometric scheme that incorporates phase coherence to extend the traditional HBT effect, facilitating phase-sensitive two-photon interference.

Findings

Achieved phase-sensitive two-photon interference with coherent auxiliary fields.

Demonstrated potential for optical synthetic aperture imaging in astronomy.

Explored applications with pulsed input fields for remote sensing.

Abstract

Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) effect is the foundation for stellar intensity interferometry. However, it is a phase insensitive two-photon interference effect. In this paper, we extend the HBT interferometer by mixing two phase-coherent input fields with coherent auxiliary fields before intensity correlation measurement and achieve phase sensitive two-photon interference so as to measure the complete complex second-order coherence function of the input fields. This practical scheme paves the way for synthetic aperture imaging for astronomical applications in optical regime. Pulsed input fields is also tested for potential remote sensing and ranging applications. We discuss the condition to implement recently proposed entanglement-based telescopy scheme with the more realistic cw broadband anti-bunched light fields.