Photons and photon correlation spectroscopy

Abstract

The majority of optical phenomena and even most of photonics can be well understood on the basis of Classical Electrodynamics. The Maxwell-Theory is perfectly adequate for understanding diffraction, interference, image formation, photonic-band-gap and negative-index materials, and even most nonlinear phenomena such as frequency doubling, mixing or short pulse physics. However, spontaneous emission or intensity correlations are not (or incorrectly) captured. For example, photons in a single-mode laser well above the threshold are (counter-intuitively) completely uncorrelated whereas thermal photons have a tendency to "come" in pairs (within the coherence time). © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.