Probing the Ginzburg-Landau Potential for Lasers Using Higher-order Photon Correlations

Abstract

The lasing transition of "class-A" lasers, where the photon lifetime is much longer than the carrier lifetime, is analogous to the second-order phase transition and, in addition, there is the Ginzburg-Landau (GL) type theory. We theoretically examine the validity of the GL theory for lasers in terms of various parameters, particularly, the ratio between photon and carrier lifetimes. For this purpose, we propose a higher-order photon correlation (g (q) ) measurement to check whether or not the photon statistics are described by the GL theory. The measurement of g (q) has an important experimental advantage because of its quantum efficiency independence. We found that the applicability of the GL theory of lasers is broader than conventionally imagined. Namely, for low-β lasers, GL theory is applicable even when the photon lifetime is comparable to the carrier lifetime. We show that our finding can be understand in the framework of center manifold reduction, which is an example of the "slaving principle" proposed by Haken.

Second-order correlation function supported optical sensing for particle detection

“…Although in this paper we concentrate on Class B lasers [37], i.e., devices where the dynamical behaviour is described by two variables (carrier density and photon number), a strong photon bunching before threshold has been numerically seen [38,39] and then carefully investigated also in Class A devices (typically described only by the dynamics of the photon number) [40]. The numerical predictions are consistent with theoretical analyses [41,42]. At the present time, much less is known on the equivalent features of Class A devices, given the intrinsic stiffness of their numerical simulations.…”