Figure 1

Experimental reconstruction of the distribution of detected photons when a single-mode thermal state is superimposed to a portion of TWB. Black dots: data; magenta curve: fitting function according to Eq. (3); gray curve: fitting function according to Eq. (8). In the left panel the mean value of the state is \(\langle m \rangle = 1.27\), whereas in the right panel is \(\langle m \rangle = 1.07\). In both cases the fidelity of data to the two theoretical descriptions is very high (\(f>0.9999\)), thus proving that the presence of a small thermal noise signal cannot be simply discriminated by analyzing the statistics.