Loss of antibunching

Abstract

We describe some of the main external mechanisms that lead to a loss of antibunching, i.e., that spoil the character of a given quantum light to deliver its photons separated from each other. Namely, we consider contamination by noise, a time jitter in the photon detection, and the effect of frequency filtering (or detection with finite bandwidth). The formalism to describe time jitter is derived and connected to the already existing one for frequency filtering. The emission from a two-level system under both incoherent and coherent driving is taken as a particular case of special interest. The coherent case is further separated into its vanishing- (Heitler) and high- (Mollow) driving regimes. We provide analytical solutions which, in the case of filtering, reveal an unsuspected structure in the transitions from perfect antibunching to thermal (incoherent case) or uncorrelated (coherent case) emission. The experimental observations of these basic and fundamental transitions would provide additional compelling evidence of the correctness and importance of the theory of frequency-resolved photon correlations