Thermal Light Cannot Be Represented as a Statistical Mixture of Single Pulses

Abstract

We ask whether or not thermal light can be represented as a mixture of single broadband coherent pulses. We find that it cannot. Such a mixture is simply not rich enough to mimic thermal light; indeed, it cannot even reproduce the first-order correlation function. We show that it is possible to construct a modified mixture of single coherent pulses that does yield the correct first-order correlation function at equal space points. However, as we then demonstrate, such a mixture cannot reproduce the second-order correlation function.

Received 28 November 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.213601

Authors & Affiliations

Aurélia Chenu^1,*, Agata M. Brańczyk^1,2, Gregory D. Scholes^1,3, and J. E. Sipe⁴

¹Department of Chemistry, Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, 80 Saint George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H6, Canada
²Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada
³Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Washington Road, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA
⁴Department of Physics, 60 Saint George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5R 3C3, Canada

^*aurelia.chenu@utoronto.ca

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Physical Review Letters