A Hanbury Brown and Twiss renascence: measurement of photon correlations yields spatio-temporal coherence

Abstract

Investigations of photon correlations similar to the Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment are since the advent of quantum optics in the center of both fundamental and application-oriented research. We derive a factorial moment-generating function of the probability distribution of electromagnetic radiation emitted by a source and absorbed by a photodetector from which we calculate an analytical expression for the second-order correlation coefficient g^{(2)} which reflects spatial coherence properties of the emitted light. The measurement of g^{(2)} thus allows to retrieve the spatial coherence parameter of the light source in terms of the combination of source area, source-detector distance, wavelength and detector area. The validity of the concept is proven by investigating g^{(2)} of true thermal light from a Xenon arc lamp and from the sun for various detector areas, in excellent agreement with the theory. Finally, we suggest a novel scheme for determining light source diameters by exploiting the spatially dependent statistics and confirm its validity by exemplary calculations. These results based on radiation thermodynamics and photon statistics give fresh insight into quantum optical properties of classical light sources, photon correlations and photodetection with promising applications perspectives, more than 68 years after the original Hanbury Brown and Twiss experiment.