Coherence and photon statistics for optical fields generated by Poisson random emissions

We examine the coherence properties and photon statistics of stationary light obtained by the superposition of nonstationary emissions occurring at random times, in accordance with a homogeneous Poisson point process. The individual emissions are assumed to be in a coherent, chaotic, or n state. The statistical nature of the emission times results in fluctuations of the relative contributions of different emissions at a given time. This is manifested by an additional positive term, exhibiting particlelike properties, in the normalized second-order correlation function. Thus, the photon-counting variance is increased. For coherent emissions, interference between the randomly delayed emissions produces additional wavelike noise. In the limit when the emissions overlap strongly, the field exhibits the correlation properties of chaotic light, regardless of the statistics of the individual emissions. In the opposite limit, when emissions seldom overlap, the light intensity is describable by a shot-noise stochastic process, and the detected photocounts show an enhanced particlelike noise, which has its largest value when the counting time is long. In that limit, the photocounts obey the Neyman type-A and generalized Polya-Aeppli distributions, when the individual emissions are coherent and chaotic, respectively. When the individual emissions correspond to the n state, the Poisson emission times result in bunching which reduces or eliminates the inherent antibunching associated with the n state.