Evolution of the quantum statistics of light

Abstract

Recently, the question of the origin of correlations in thermal light has again been debated. The alternative viewpoints suggest that (i) stimulated emission causes the correlations implied by Bose-Einstein statistics and exemplified by the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect, or (ii) stimulated emission coherently amplifies any initial field, with no change in the nature of photon statistics, apart from the addition of, and interference with, spontaneous-emission noise. It is shown that two essentially different physical models have been considered previously, with many results being only approximate. For these models we obtain the evolution of the photon statistics by deriving exactly the generating function for the diagonal elements of the field density matrix and the quantum characteristic function. The source of Bose-Einstein correlations is seen to be merely the interference in the superposition of random independent fields from a chaotic source, spontaneous emission being one example. Extending the investigation to a nonlinear model, we show that, although there is no longer coherent amplification, it is still not correct to infer that this interaction, which produces the amplification, also leads to Bose-Einstein statistics.