Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Photonics

Chaos from symmetry

Nature Physics volume 11, pages 895–896 (2015)Cite this article

Subjects

This article has been updated

Disorder in arrays of evanescently coupled waveguides turns out to have unexpected consequences on the photon number statistics of coherent light.

As a statistical measure of the intensity fluctuations, coherence tells us a lot about the very nature of wave fields. Defined as the autocorrelation of the intensity of a light field, the second-order coherence function g(2) not only allows a classical state to be differentiated from a quantum state, but it also yields information about the statistics of the source and/or the medium through which the light is propagating. In the classical regime, there are two exceptional values of g(2). Fully coherent light is characterized by g(2) = 1, whereas for incoherent light, also referred to as 'thermal' or 'chaotic', g(2) = 2. Well-known examples are laser light for the former, and black-body radiation for the latter.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Get just this article for as long as you need it

$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Coherent states of light are launched into disordered waveguide arrays.

Change history

  • 07 October 2015

    In the News & Views 'Chaos from symmetry' (Nature Physics http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys3498; 2015), the lower plot in Fig. 1 should have been labelled 'Coherent state'. This error has now been corrected in all versions 7 October 2015.

References

  1. Glauber, R. J. Phys. Rev. 130, 2529 (1963).

    Article  ADS  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Louisell, W. H. Quantum and Statistical Properties of Radiation (Wiley, 1973).

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  3. Kondakci, H. E. et al. Nature Phys. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphys3482 (2015).

  4. Drude, P. Ann. Phys. 306, 566–613 (1900).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Anderson, P. W. Phys. Rev. 109, 1492 (1958).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  6. Wiersma, D. S. et al. Nature 390, 671–673 (1997).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  7. Schwartz, T. et al. Nature 446, 52–55 (2007).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  8. Lahini, Y. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 013906 (2008).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  9. Lahini, Y. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 163905 (2010).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

  10. Lahini, Y. et al. Phys. Rev. A 84, 041806(R) (2011).

    Article  ADS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alexander Szameit is at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, 07743 Jena, Germany,

    Alexander Szameit

Authors
  1. Alexander Szameit
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Szameit.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Szameit, A. Chaos from symmetry. Nature Phys 11, 895–896 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3498

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3498

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing