Near-lossless method for generating thermal photon-bunched light

TL;DR

This paper presents a near-lossless method to generate thermal photon-bunched light with significantly improved efficiency, enabling practical sensing applications like range finding and imaging that rely on timing correlations.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel low-loss technique for producing photon bunching with conversion efficiency nearly 10^9 times higher than previous methods.

Findings

Achieved nearly 9 orders of magnitude increase in photon bunching efficiency

Demonstrated potential for practical sensing applications using thermal light

Overcame limitations of coherence time and brightness in existing sources

Abstract

Thermal light sources exhibiting photon bunching have been suggested for sensing applications that exploit timing correlations of stationary light, including range finding, clock synchronization, and non-line-of-sight imaging. However, these proposals have remained unrealized in practice because available sources of photon bunching either possess coherence times too short to be timing resolved by photodetectors, or produce brightness levels too low to tolerate realistic return losses. In this work, we demonstrate a low-loss method for generating photon bunching with a conversion efficiency nearly 9 orders of magnitude higher than that achieved by many other bunching processes.