INTERFEROMETRY OF THE INTENSITY FLUCTUATIONS IN LIGHT .1. BASIC THEORY - THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PHOTONS IN COHERENT BEAMS OF RADIATION
INTERFEROMETRY OF THE INTENSITY FLUCTUATIONS IN LIGHT .1. BASIC THEORY - THE CORRELATION BETWEEN PHOTONS IN COHERENT BEAMS OF RADIATION
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DOI：
10.1098/rspa.1957.0177
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发表时间：
1957-01-01
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
TWISS, RQ
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
BROWN, RH;TWISS, RQ
通过量子力学处理表明，平面光波照射下不同点的光电子发射时间是部分相关的，并且通过将光电阴极视为具有适当转换效率的平方律探测器的经典理论得到了相同的结果。有人认为，这种现象体现了光的波而不是粒子方面，并且它最容易被解释为波前不同点处的强度波动之间的相关性，这种强度波动是由于光的不同频率分量之间的干扰而产生的。从粒子图像的角度来看，解释要简单得多，但事实证明，这种相关性与所谓的光子聚束直接相关，而光子聚束是由于光量子相互不可区分并服从玻色-爱因斯坦统计而产生的。然而，需要强调的是，在实际检测到光能之前使用光子概念是高度误导的，因为在干涉实验中，电磁场的行为方式无法用经典粒子来解释。该理论的定量预测已被实验室实验证实，并且该现象已在干涉仪中用于测量天狼星的视角直径：这些结果以及在天文学中的进一步应用将在以后的论文中详细讨论。结果表明，当应用于寻找单光束产生的光电发射电流的波动时，经典处理和量子处理给出相同的结果，并指出这些波动与相干光束中光子之间的相关性之间的联系。这里给出的结果与卡恩从基于量子统计的分析中获得的结果完全一致：然而，它们与费尔盖特和克拉克·琼斯基于热力学基础得出的结果不同，并且讨论了这种差异的原因。
It is shown by a quantum-mechanical treatment that the emission times of photoelectrons at different points illuminated by a plane wave of light are partially correlated, and identical results are obtained by a classical theory in which the photocathode is regarded as a square-law detector of suitable conversion efficiency. It is argued that the phenomenon exemplifies the wave rather than the particle aspect of light and that it may most easily be interpreted as a correlation between the intensity fluctuations at different points on a wavefront which arise because of interference between different frequency components of the light. From the point of view of the corpuscular picture the interpretation is much less straightforward but it is shown that the correlation is directly related to the so-called bunching of photons which arises because light quanta are mutually indistinguishable and obey Bose-Einstein statistics. However, it is stressed that the use of the photon concept before the light energy is actually detected is highly misleading since, in an interference experiment, the electromagnetic field behaves in a manner which cannot be explained in terms of classical particles. The quantitative predictions of the theory have been confirmed by laboratory experiments and the phenomenon has been used, in an interferometer, to measure the apparent angular diameter of Sirius: these results, together with further applications to astronomy, will be discussed in detail in later papers. It is shown that the classical and quantum treatments give identical results when applied to find the fluctuations in the photoemission current produced by a single light beam, and the connexion between these fluctuations and the correlation between photons in coherent beams is pointed out. The results given here are in full agreement with those obtained by Kahn from an analysis based on quantum statistics: however, they differ from those derived on thermodynamical grounds by Fellgett and by Clark Jones and the reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.