ABSTRACT We present a unified theoretical and experimental investigation of multiple‐photon subtraction on intensity‐modulated optical fields with negative binomial photon statistics. Using an electro‐optic modulator, we generate fields with tunable from 1.00 to 2.85, spanning coherent, thermal, and super‐thermal regimes. Our theoretical framework based on the negative binomial distribution reveals that ‐photon subtraction transforms the coherence parameter as , providing explicit predictions for all photon statistics. Through systematic experiments with heralded photon‐number resolving detection, we demonstrate excellent quantitative agreement between theory and experiment. The results confirm that a beam splitter with photon‐number resolving detector implementation faithfully reproduces ideal photon subtraction for , while zero‐photon subtraction represents a distinct conditional measurement. This work provides a unified reference for understanding photon subtraction across all intensity correlation regimes.
Kim et al. (Wed,) studied this question.