Interference of macroscopic beams on a beam splitter: phase uncertainty converted into photon-number uncertaintyстатья
Статья опубликована в высокорейтинговом журнале
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Дата последнего поиска статьи во внешних источниках: 27 мая 2015 г.
Аннотация: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.