Non-classical Light

It there are processes which have to complete until a photon can be followed by another one, one speaks of non-classical light. Its statistics has a minimum where it has a maximum in classical light: at the shortest time scales ("anti-bunching").

Due to the progress in trapping techniques it became even possible to generate photons in an arbitrarily given pace - for instance when a single atom is regularly induced by a laser to emit a photon. This is of interest for encoding of information: Since a photon can be 'read' only once, one recognizes by the lack of photons in the sequence if there is anyone who joins in reading.

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