Erlangen 2018 – scientific programme
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Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 64: Quantum Optics and Photonics IV
Q 64.1: Talk
Friday, March 9, 2018, 10:30–10:45, K 0.016
Quantum noise enhanced through nonlinear effects: extreme events and extreme bunching — •Kirill Spasibko1,2, Mathieu Manceau1, Gerd Leuchs1,2, Radim Filip3, and Maria Chekhova1,2,4 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light, 91058 Erlangen, Germany — 2University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058 Erlangen, Germany — 3Department of Optics, Palacky University, 77146 Olomouc, Czech Republic — 4Department of Physics, M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, 119991 Moscow, Russia
Extreme events and rogue waves are observed for different physical systems. They are especially fascinating because they can lead to catastrophic changes in the system despite being quite rare. However, their probability is still much higher than one expects from Gaussian random processes, i.e. the probability distribution has a 'heavy tail'.
In optics such distributions are obtained mainly from supercontinuum generation using laser light with faint (shot-noise-limited) fluctuations to pump a nonlinear medium. If a 'noisy' pump is used, one expects to have even more pronounced heavy tails.
In this work we used 'noisy' pump, obtained via parametric down-conversion, to produce tremendously fluctuating light from two different nonlinear processes: optical harmonics and supercontinuum generation. The generated light shows heavy-tailed statistics with extreme bunching (the bunching parameter g(2) being as high as 170) and extreme events (with photon numbers exceeding the mean values by three orders of magnitude).