Super-bunching light with giant high-order correlations and extreme multi-photon events

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a super-bunching light source with unprecedented high-order correlations and extreme multi-photon events, achieved through nonlinear interactions in photonic crystal fibers, with potential applications in quantum technologies.

Contribution

The study reports the first generation of super-bunching light with extremely high gN(0) values and extreme multi-photon events, surpassing previous correlation limits.

Findings

g2(0) reaches 5.86×10^4

g5(0) reaches 2.72×10^8

Extreme multi-photon events with 31 photons per pulse

Abstract

Non-classical light sources emitting bundles of N-photons with strong correlation represent versatile resources of interdisciplinary importance with applications ranging from fundamental tests of quantum mechanics to quantum information processing. Yet, high-order correlations, gN(0),quantifying photon correlation, are still limited to hundreds. Here, we report the generation of a super-bunching light source in photonic crystal fiber with g2(0) reaching 5.86*104 and g5(0) up to 2.72*108, through measuring its photon number probability distributions. under giant g2(0) values, the super-bunching light source presents upturned-tail photon distributions and ubiquitous extreme multi-photon events, where 31 photons from a single light pulse at a mean of 1.99*10-4 photons per pulse have been determined. The probability of this extreme event has been enhanced by 10139 folds compared to a coherent laser with Poissonian distribution. By varying the power of the pumping laser, both photon number distributions and corresponding high-order correlations of this light source can be substantially tailored from Poissonian to super-bunching distributions. These phenomena are attributed to the synchronized nonlinear interactions in photonic crystal fibers pumping by bright squeezed light, and the theoretical simulations agree well with the experimental results. Our research showcases the ability to achieve non-classical light sources with giant high-order correlations and extreme multi-photon events, paving the way for high-order correlation imaging, extreme nonlinear optical effects, quantum information processing, and exploring light-matter interactions with multi-photon physics.