Second order coherence of broadband down-converted light on ultrashort time scale determined by two photon absorption in semiconductor

Fabien Boitier (1) , Antoine Godard (2) , Aleksandr Ryasnyanskiy (3) , Nicolas Dubreuil (3) , Philippe Delaye (3) , Claude Fabre (4) , Emmanuel Rosencher (1)

1 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Châtillon]
2 ONERA - The French Aerospace Lab [Palaiseau]
3 Laboratoire Charles Fabry de l'Institut d'Optique / Manolia
4 LKB (Jussieu) - Laboratoire Kastler Brossel

We study the photon correlation properties of broadband parametric down-converted light. The measurement of the photon correlation is carried out thanks to a modified Hanbury Brown-Twiss interferometer based on two photon absorption in GaAs detector. Since this method is not affected by the phase matching conditions of the detecting apparatus (so called “final state post-selection”), the detection bandwidth can be extremely large. This is illustrated by studying, with the same apparatus, the degree of second order coherence of parametric light in both degenerate and non-degenerate cases. We show that our experiment is able to determine the coherent as well as the incoherent contributions to the degree of second order coherence of parametric light with a time resolution in the fs range scale.

Keywords: Multiphoton processes; Photon statistics

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Fabien Boitier, Antoine Godard, Aleksandr Ryasnyanskiy, Nicolas Dubreuil, Philippe Delaye, et al.. Second order coherence of broadband down-converted light on ultrashort time scale determined by two photon absorption in semiconductor. Optics Express, 2010, 18 (19), p. 20401-20408. ⟨hal-00561197⟩