N. Spagnolo, C. Vitelli, L. Sansoni, E. Maiorino, P. Mataloni, F. Sciarrino, D. J. Brod, E. F. Galvao, A. Crespi, R. Ramponi, R. Osellame
The so-called birthday paradox is the realization that a small number of independent random events (in this case, birthdays) may result in surprisingly large coincidence probabilities. Recently a theoretical analysis was made of the analogue situation for bosons: how many non-interacting bosons distributed randomly in m modes are required for a large overlap probability? The answer requires a quantification of the characteristic bunching exhibited by bosons, responsible for phenomena such as Bose-Einstein condensation. Here we report experiments which characterize bosonic bunching of up to three photons evolving in linear-optical chips with as many as 16 modes. Besides verifying the predictions associated with the bosonic birthday paradox, our experiments also confirm a new, sharper bosonic bunching law that we prove. Our results provide a comprehensive picture of bosonic coalescence in multimode chips, which may have applications in quantum communication, metrology and quantum computation.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3188
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