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Measuring photon bunching at ultrashort timescale by two-photon absorption in semiconductors

Nature Physics volume 5, pages 267–270 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Photon beams exhibit temporal correlations that are characteristics of their emission mechanism. For instance, photons issued from incoherent sources tend to be detected in bunches. This striking ‘bunching’ behaviour has been observed in the seminal experiment by Hanbury-Brown and Twiss (HBT) in the fifties, who measured the time of arrival of partially coherent photons on two separate photon-counting modules1. Since then, HBT interferometry has become a widespread technique to study photon correlations down to only the nanosecond range, because of the detector-limited bandwidth, preventing the observation of bunching for real thermal sources. It has been suggested later that two-photon absorption (TPA) could measure the photon temporal correlations at a much shorter timescale2,3, as it involves an almost simultaneous absorption of two photons, within a maximum delay given by the Heisenberg principle. Here, for the first time, this prediction is experimentally demonstrated using TPA in a GaAs photon-counting module. We have observed photon bunching in the femtosecond range for real blackbody sources (an enhancement of six orders of magnitude in the time resolution of present techniques), opening the way to monitor optical quantum statistics at the ultrashort timescale.

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Figure 1: Principle of TPA and experimental set-up.
Figure 2: Characterization of TPA detection response.
Figure 3: Variation of the TPA photocounts as a function of the delay τ in the Michelson set-up.
Figure 4

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Acknowledgements

The authors are deeply indebted to J. Bonnet, R. Haidar, G. Canat and A. Bresson for help in the experiments. They thank J. Khurgin and P. Grangier for critical reading of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DMPH/ONERA, The French Aerospace Lab, Chemin de la Hunière, 91761 Palaiseau, France

    F. Boitier, A. Godard & E. Rosencher

  2. Physics Department, Ecole Polytechnique, 91763 Palaiseau, France

    E. Rosencher

  3. Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6, ENS, CNRS, CC74 75252 Paris cedex 05, France

    C. Fabre

Authors
  1. F. Boitier
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  2. A. Godard
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  3. E. Rosencher
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  4. C. Fabre
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All authors contributed at each step of this work.

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Correspondence to E. Rosencher.

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Boitier, F., Godard, A., Rosencher, E. et al. Measuring photon bunching at ultrashort timescale by two-photon absorption in semiconductors. Nature Phys 5, 267–270 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1218

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