Abstract

We report the first measurement on "fringe-visibility" $\text{V}\left(\overline{\text{n}}\right)$ in Michelson-interferometry and on Hanbury Brown-Twiss correlation (i.e. first- and second-order coherence) with an highly-degenerate photon beam interacting with an optical Beam-Splitter (BS) (cfr.Fig.1) Note that, while with common lamps the attainable photon-degeneracy is of order $〈\text{n}〉=\overline{\text{n}}=0.001$, in our experiment we attain $\overline{\text{n}}>10.000$, corresponding to a quasi Planckian distribution with temperature $\text{T}=\left(\overline{\text{n}}hv/k\right)={10}^{8}K$, about three order-of-magnitude larger that the one of the solar "Corona" (1).

© 1988 Optical Society of America