Abstract

New methods that do not use correlators were developed to characterize the statistical features of light.^1,2 In this respect, we proposed and studied the cumulative subinterval photon-counting probability (CSPP) method,³ which exhibits interesting potential features. The CSPP method is very sensitive when the statistics deviate from the Poisson distribution. The method is applied in two steps. First, the photon-counting probabilities p(n, mT, ma) are measured for different values of the measurement time interval mT, where a is the average value of the counting rate in the time interval T. This first step is a hardware stage in the method implementation.

© 1991 Optical Society of America