Abstract

It is commonly assumed that a single photon incident on an ideal beamsplitter must either be transmitted or reflected. The author recently showed,¹ however, that any beamsplitter has a small probability of splitting an incident photon into two secondary photons, conserving energy in the process. This effect is a consequence of quantization of the field and is unrelated to any nonlinear properties of the material in the beamsplitter.

© 1996 Optical Society of America