1. Interference of macroscopic beams on a beam splitter: phase uncertainty converted into photon-number uncertainty.
- Author
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Spasibko, K Yu, Töppel, F, Iskhakov, T Sh, Stobińska, M, Chekhova, M V, and Leuchs, G
- Subjects
MOLECULAR beams ,PHOTON scattering ,LIGHT scattering ,DISTRIBUTION (Probability theory) ,PROBABILITY theory - Abstract
Squeezed-vacuum twin beams, commonly generated through parametric down-conversion, are known to have perfect photon-number correlations. According to the Heisenberg principle, this is accompanied by a huge uncertainty in their relative phase. By overlapping bright twin beams on a beam splitter, we convert phase fluctuations into photon-number fluctuations and observe this uncertainty as a typical ‘U-shape’ of the output photon-number distribution. This effect, although reported for atomic ensembles and giving hope for phase super-resolution, has never been observed for light beams. The shape of the normalized photon-number difference distribution is similar to the one that would be observed for high-order Fock states. It can be also mimicked by classical beams with artificially mixed phase, but without any perspective for phase super-resolution. The probability distribution at the beam splitter output can be used for filtering macroscopic superpositions at the input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
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