Date: Monday, November 25, 2013
Time: 12:30 pm
Location: PHYS 401

TITLE:
New measurement scheme for second-order correlation measurements of thermal light

ABSTRACT:
Experiments using second order correlations have proven to be important for many applications, such as the Hanbury Brown Twiss interferometer which measures the angular size of stars, three dimensional LIDAR imaging, ghost imaging, quantum computing, and lithography. Of these experiments, only one regularly uses thermal light: the Hanbury Brown Twiss interferometer. The other experiments usually use lasers or entangled light sources, which are less than practical for many real-world applications. In addition, entangled experiments are typically performed at the single photon level and prone to decoherence. However, all of these experiments can also be performed with thermal light, such as sunlight, if one condition is met: the temporal coherence is increased allowing many measurements to be made within the coherence time. This is problematic for thermal light, as its temporal coherence is the inverse of its bandwidth, on the order of 10^-15. Our goal is to investigate the use of linear and nonlinear optics to stretch the time-scale of thermal light, reducing the bandwidth and increasing the temporal coherence without drastically reducing the intensity, allowing Hui Chen's Positive Negative Fluctuation Correlation Protocol to be used. This would result in a new method to achieve high intensity, high contrast second-order correlation measurements with broadband thermal light.