Abstract
We present the experimental generation of light with directly observable close-to-ideal thermal statistical properties. The thermal light state is prepared using a spontaneous Raman emission in a warm atomic vapor. The photon number statistics are evaluated by both the measurement of second-order correlation function and by the detailed analysis of the corresponding photon number distribution, which certifies the quality of the Bose–Einstein statistics generated by a natural physical mechanism. We further demonstrate the extension of the spectral bandwidth of the generated light to hundreds of MHz domain while keeping the ideal thermal statistics, which suggests a direct applicability of the presented source in a broad range of applications including optical metrology, tests of robustness of quantum communication protocols, or quantum thermodynamics.
Highlights
Generation of light statistics has been of paramount importance for understanding various phenomena in statistical and quantum optics since the presentation of pioneering experiments by R
The advent of lasers has triggered a prompt application of methods for estimation of light statistics on studies in broad range of research directions ranging from atomic spectroscopy to optical imaging and metrology, reaching far beyond the areas of pure optical physics and astronomy
The uncertainties of the evaluated entropies have been estimated using the Monte Carlo routine from the uncertainties of the measured numbers of photon clicks. These results qualify the realized single-mode thermal light source for experiments in quantum thermodynamics [18], where the ideal thermal light statistics is required to reliably emulate thermal equilibrium quantum states corresponding to basic energy resources for thermodynamical tests at single photon level [41]
Summary
Generation of light statistics has been of paramount importance for understanding various phenomena in statistical and quantum optics since the presentation of pioneering experiments by R. Coherence of thermal light field can be fully described by the classical Maxwell theory of light waves, their precise experimental generation and detection shares number of difficulties typically associated with preparation of single photon states These include strict requirements on the observed field modeness and photon detection bandwidth, when aiming for direct observation of exact thermal statistics of photons from a source at thermal equilibrium. The observability of the ideal photon bunching is achieved by the satisfaction of two fundamental experimental requirements, high single modeness of the detected light and sufficiently narrow spectral bandwidth on the order of tens of MHz relative to the timing jitter of the employed single photon detectors of a few hundred picoseconds These observation is complemented by directly measurable Bose-Einstein statistics of generated light, which allows the saturation of entropy for given mean photon number. We provide an experimental guideline for achieving the large bandwidth and outline its limits in the presented experimental platform
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