Higher-Order Photon Bunching in a Semiconductor Microcavity

Abstract

A Multiple Photon Pileup: The field of quantum optics began with the observation that two independent photons emitted from a thermal source tend to bunch together. The same is true for any number of bosons, but how do the statistics and correlations evolve experimentally as the number increases? Aβmann et al. (p. 297 ) have developed a streak-camera technique that can distinguish the photon number and measure the higher-order correlations between the photons at the detector. The results confirm the predicted “ n factorial” dependence, showing that the tendency to bunch gets stronger as the number of independent photons is increased.