Photon extrabunching in ultrabright twin beams measured by two-photon counting in a semiconductor

Fabien Boitier (1) , Antoine Godard (2) , 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

For many years twin beams originating from parametric down-converted light beams have aroused great interest and attention in the photonics community. One particular aspect of the twin beams is their peculiar intensity correlation functions, which are related to the coincidence rate of photon pairs. Here we take advantage of the huge bandwidth offered by two-photon absorption in a semiconductor to quantitatively determine correlation functions of twin beams generated by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. Compared with classical incoherent sources, photon extrabunching is unambiguously and precisely measured, originating from exact coincidence between down-converted pairs of photons, travelling in unison. These results strongly establish that two-photon counting in semiconductors is a powerful tool for the absolute measurement of light beam photon correlations at ultrashort timescales.

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Fabien Boitier, Antoine Godard, Nicolas Dubreuil, Philippe Delaye, Claude Fabre, et al.. Photon extrabunching in ultrabright twin beams measured by two-photon counting in a semiconductor. Nature Communications, 2011, 2, pp.425. ⟨10.1038/ncomms1423⟩. ⟨hal-00621103⟩