Abstract

We consider the basic problem of spontaneous parametric generation from quantum noise fluctuations Various experiments revealed that in the parametric fluorescence process a transition occurs between two regimes respectively characterized by the incoherence of the initial quantum noise and the coherence of the generated signal and idler fields We investigate here the mechanism responsible for the incoherence-to-coherence transition The problem is not trivial, because the existence of this transition seems to depend critically on the experimental conditions, as revealed in Refs [1,2], that report on the generation of spatially incoherent down-converted fields in the spontaneous parametric process

© 2000 IEEE