2006/10/13 by Jacques Arnaud, Arnaud, Jacques, Laurent Chusseau +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0610106
116 pages Second draft of a book project. To be completed by a part II incuding extended details on application of the theory
openalex publication_date 2006/10/13 · arxiv created 2007/01/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
When light originating from a laser diode driven by non-fluctuating electrical currents is incident on a photo-detector, the photo-current does not fluctuate much. Precisely, this means that the variance of the number of photo-electrons counted over a large time interval is much smaller that the average number of photo-electrons. At non-zero Fourier frequency Ω the photo-current power spectrum is of the form Ω2/(1+Ω2) and thus vanishes as Ω→ 0, a conclusion equivalent to the one given above. The purpose of this paper is to show that results such as the one just cited may be derived from a (semi-classical) theory in which neither the optical field nor the electron wave-function are quantized. We first observe that almost any medium may be described by a circuit and distinguish (possibly non-linear) conservative elements such as pure capacitances, and conductances that represent the atom-field coupling. The theory rests on the non-relativistic approximation. Nyquist noise sources (in which the Planck term ℏω/2 is being restored) are associated with positive or negative conductances, and the law of average-energy conservation is enforced. We consider mainly second-order correlations in stationary linearized regimes.