Research investigation directed toward extending the useful range of the electromagnetic spectrum

Substantial progress has been made in understanding the generation and detection of light from an unified statistical point of view. To this end, the coherence properties and photon statistics of stationary light obtained by the superposition of nonstationary emissions occurring at random times, in accordance with a homogeneous Poisson point process has been investigated. The individual emissions were assumed to be in a coherent, chaotic, or n state. The statistical nature of the mission times results in fluctuations of the relative contributions of different emissions at a given time. In the limit when the emissions overlap strongly, the field exhibits the correlation properties of chaotic light, regardless of the statistics of the individual emissions. This is an important result. The effect of Bernoulli random deletion and additive independent Poisson noise on photon-counting statistics has been examined. Under the action of such deletion and/or noise, both super-Poissonian and sub-Poissonian distributions move toward the Poisson distribution but never convert from one form to the other. We also studied the counting statistics for stationary and nonstationary cascaded Poisson processes, obtaining a simple equation for the variance-to-mean ratio (noisiness) in the limit of long counting times.