Abstract

Spontaneous emission noise can be thought of as being due to vacuum fluctuations and may appear to be inherently quantum-mechanical in nature. The same can be said of the loss of coherence in which-path experiments, which is due to the entanglement of a photon with some other system in one path through an interferometer. Both of these processes have been considered in the limit of high field intensities in order to determine whether or not they have a classical analogy. It was found that the same phenomena occur classically as well due to chaos. The extent to which these phenomena can or cannot be considered to be inherently quantum-mechanical will be discussed.

© 1993 Optical Society of America