No Arabic abstract
Photon statistical measurements on a semiconductor microlaser, obtained using single-photon counting techniques, show that a newly discovered spontaneous pulsed emission regime possesses superthermal statistical properties. The observed spike dynamics, typical of small-scale devices, is at the origin of an unexpected discordance between the probability density function and its representation in terms of the first moments, a discordance so far unnoticed in all devices. The impact of this new dynamics is potentially large, since coincidence techniques are presently the sole capable of characterizing light emitted by nanolasers.
Developments in quantum technologies lead to new applications that require radiation sources with specific photon statistics. A widely used Poissonian statistics are easily produced by lasers; however, some applications require super- or sub-Poissonian statistics. Statistical properties of a light source are characterized by the second-order coherence function g^(2)(0). This function distinguishes stimulated radiation of lasers with g^(2)(0)=1 from light of other sources. For example, g^(2)(0)=2 for black-body radiation, and g^(2)(0)=0 for single-photon emission. One of the applications requiring super-Poissonian statistics (g^(2)(0)>1) is ghost imaging with thermal light. Ghost imaging also requires light with a narrow linewidth and high intensity. Currently, rather expensive and inefficient light sources are used for this purpose. In the last year, a superluminescent diode based on amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) has been considered as a new light source for ghost imaging. Even though ASE has been widely studied, its photon statistics has not been settled - there are neither reliable theoretical estimates of the second-order coherence function nor unambiguous experimental data. Our computer simulation clearly establishes that coherence properties of light produced by ASE are similar to that of a thermal source with g^(2)(0)=2 independent of pump power. This result manifests the fundamental difference between ASE and laser radiation.
The angular emission pattern of a random laser is typically very irregular and difficult to tune. Here we show by detailed numerical calculations that one can overcome the lack of control over this emission pattern by actively shaping the spatial pump distribution. We demonstrate, in particular, how to obtain customized pump profiles to achieve highly directional emission. Going beyond the regime of strongly scattering media where localized modes with a given directionality can simply be selected by the pump, we present an optimization-based approach which shapes extended lasing modes in the weakly scattering regime according to any predetermined emission pattern.
In a recent paper, we have shown that the QED nonlinear corrections imply a phase correction to the linear evolution of crossing electromagnetic waves in vacuum. Here, we provide a more complete analysis, including a full numerical solution of the QED nonlinear wave equations for short-distance propagation in a symmetric configuration. The excellent agreement of such a solution with the result that we obtain using our perturbatively-motivated Variational Approach is then used to justify an analytical approximation that can be applied in a more general case. This allows us to find the most promising configuration for the search of photon-photon scattering in optics experiments. In particular, we show that our previous requirement of phase coherence between the two crossing beams can be released. We then propose a very simple experiment that can be performed at future exawatt laser facilities, such as ELI, by bombarding a low power laser beam with the exawatt bump.
Levy flights for light have been demonstrated in disordered systems with and without optical gain, and remained unobserved in ordered ones. In the present letter, we investigate, numerically and experimentally, Levy flights for light in ordered systems due to an ordered (conventional) laser. The statistical analysis was performed on the intensity fluctuations of the output spectra upon repeated identical experimental realizations. We found out that the optical gain and the mirrors reflectivity are critical parameters governing the fluctuation statistics. We identified Levy regimes for gain around the laser threshold, and Gaussian-Levy-Gaussian crossovers were unveiling when increasing the gain from below to above the threshold. The experimental results were corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations, and the fluctuations were associated to a Langevin noise source that takes into account the randomness of the spontaneous emission, which seeds the laser emission and can cause large fluctuations of the output spectra from shot-to-shot under identical experimental realizations.
We present a stochastic procedure to investigate the correlation spectra of quantum dot superluminescent diodes. The classical electric field of a diode is formed by a polychromatic superposition of many independent stochastic oscillators. Assuming fields with individual carrier frequencies, Lorentzian linewidths and amplitudes we can form any relevant experimental spectrum using a least square fit. This is illustrated for Gaussian and Lorentzian spectra, Voigt profiles and box shapes. Eventually, the procedure is applied to an experimental spectrum of a quantum dot superluminescent diode which determines the first- and second-order temporal correlation functions of the emission. We find good agreement with the experimental data and a quantized treatment. Thus, a stochastic field represents broadband light emitted by quantum dot superluminescent diodes.