Photon bunching and antibunching

III. Photon Bunching and Antibunching Effects in Nonstationary Fields... 

III. PHOTON BUNCHING AND ANTIBUNCHING EFFECTS IN NONSTATIONARY FIELDS (A. MIRANOWICZ, J. BAJER,... 

All Possible Predictions of Photon Bunching and Antibunching of Quantum Fields According to Defs. I, II, and III ... 

Figure C 1.5.10. Nonnalized fluorescence intensity correlation function for a single terrylene molecule in p-terjDhenyl at 2 K. The solid line is tire tlieoretical curve. Regions of deviation from tire long-time value of unity due to photon antibunching (the finite lifetime of tire excited singlet state), Rabi oscillations (absorjDtion-stimulated emission cycles driven by tire laser field) and photon bunching (dark periods caused by intersystem crossing to tire triplet state) are indicated. Reproduced witli pennission from Plakhotnik et al [66], adapted from [118].

Figure 11. Schematic of the temporal behavior of photon emission from a single molecule showing bunching on the scale of the triplet lifetime (upper half) and antibunching on the scale of the inverse of the Rabi frequency (lower half).

Using the experimental setup (Fig. 15) described in the last paragraph, the fluorescence intensity correlation function was measured for a single terrylene molecule in p-terphenyl over nine orders of magnitude in time by the authors group [27]. The experimental trace in Fig. 16 clearly displays the characteristic features of photon antibunching and photon bunching. The onset of Rabi oscillations is clearly visible, too. We now want to discuss separately these three effects for different systems and what can be learned from such measurements. 

Finally, tlie ability to optically address single molecules is enabling some beautiful experiments in quantum optics. The non-Poissonian photon arrival time distributions expected tlieoretically for single molecules have been observed directly, botli antibunching at short times [112] and bunching on longer time scales [6, 112 and 113]. The fluorescence excitation spectra of single molecules bound to spherical microcavities have been examined as a probe... 

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