Antibunching-like behavior of mesoscopic light

Sci Rep. 2017 Dec 1;7(1):16787. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-16773-9.

Abstract

We present the implementation of a compact setup for the generation of sub-Poissonian states of light exhibiting the analogous of antibunching behavior in the so-called mesoscopic intensity domain. In the scheme, the idler arm of a pulsed multi-mode twin-beam state is directly measured by a photon-number-resolving detector, whereas the signal arm is divided at a balanced beam splitter, at whose outputs other two photon-number-resolving detectors measure the number of photons. The three detectors measure synchronous with each laser pulse. Due to the nonclassical correlations in the twin beam, when a given value of photons is measured in the idler arm, the conditional states obtained in post processing at the two beam-splitter outputs are nonclassical, showing lower-than-one values of the Fano factor and of the photon autocorrelation coefficient. The possibility to engineer sub-Poissonian states nearly approaching the Fock state with one photon is also addressed.