https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-02857-7
Regular Article
Distance sensitivity of thermal light second-order interference beyond spatial coherence
1
Dipartimento Interateneo di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Bari, 70126, Bari, Italy
2
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – Sezione di Bari, 70125, Bari, Italy
3
International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT), University of Gdansk, 80-308, Gdańsk, Poland
4
Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, 02-093, Warsaw, Poland
5
School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Portsmouth, PO1 3QL, Portsmouth, UK
6
Department of Physics, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), 37673, Pohang, Korea
7
Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, PO1 3FX, Portsmouth, UK
Received:
8
March
2022
Accepted:
20
May
2022
Published online:
1
June
2022
We demonstrate the distance sensitivity of thermal light second-order interference beyond spatial coherence. This kind of interference, emerging from the measurement of the correlation between intensity fluctuations on two detectors, is sensitive to the distances separating a remote mask from the source and the detector, even when such information cannot be retrieved by first-order intensity measurements. We show how the sensitivity to such distances is intimately connected to the degree of correlation of the measured interference pattern in different experimental scenarios and independently of the spectral properties of light. Remarkably, in specific configurations, sensitivity to the distances of remote objects can be preserved even in the presence of turbulence. Unlike in previous schemes, such a distance sensitivity is reflected in the fundamental emergence of new critical parameters which benchmark the degree of second-order correlation, describing the counterintuitive emergence of spatial second-order interference not only in the absence of (first-order) coherence at both detectors but also when first-order interference is observed at one of the two detectors.
© The Author(s) 2022
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
