Hanbury Brown and Twiss Effect - History

History

In 1956, Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Q. Twiss published A test of a new type of stellar interferometer on Sirius, in which two photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), separated by about 6 meters, were aimed at the star Sirius. Light was collected into the PMTs using mirrors from searchlights. An interference effect was observed between the two intensities, revealing a positive correlation between the two signals, despite the fact that no phase information was collected. Hanbury Brown and Twiss used the interference signal to determine the apparent angular size of Sirius, claiming excellent resolution.

Also, in the field of particle physics, Goldhaber et al. performed an experiment in 1959 in Berkeley and found an unexpected angular correlation among identical pions, in order to discover the ρ0 resonance (by means of ) . From then on, the HBT technique started to be used in particular by the heavy-ion community to determine the space-time dimensions of the particle emission source for heavy ion collisions. For recent developments in this field, cf. for example the review article by Lisa .

The original HBT result met with much skepticism in the physics community. Although intensity interferometry had been widely used in radio astronomy where Maxwell's equations are valid, at optical wavelengths the light would be quantised into a relatively small number of photons. Many physicists worried that the correlation was inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics. Some even claimed that the effect violated the uncertainty principle. Hanbury Brown and Twiss resolved the dispute in a neat series of papers (see References below) which demonstrated first that wave transmission in quantum optics had exactly the same mathematical form as Maxwell's equations albeit with an additional noise term due to quantisation at the detector, and secondly that according to Maxwell's equations, intensity interferometry should work. Others, such as Edward Mills Purcell immediately supported the technique, pointing out that the clumping of bosons was simply a manifestation of an effect already known in statistical mechanics. After a number of experiments, the whole physics community agreed that the observed effect was real.

The original experiment used the fact that two bosons tend to arrive at two separate detectors at the same time. Morgan and Mandel used a thermal photon source to create a dim beam of photons and observed the tendency of the photons to arrive at the same time on a single detector. Both of these effects used the wave nature of light to create a correlation in arrival time - if a single photon beam is split into two beams, then the particle nature of light requires that each photon is only observed at a single detector, and so an anti-correlation was observed in 1986. Finally, bosons have a tendency to clump together, giving rise to Bose–Einstein correlations, while fermions due to the Pauli exclusion principle, tend to spread apart leading to Fermi–Dirac (anti)correlations. Bose–Einstein correlations have been observed between pions, kaons and photons, and Fermi–Dirac (anti)correlations between protons, neutrons and electrons. For a general introduction in this field cf. the textbook on Bose–Einstein correlations by Richard M. Weiner A difference in repulsion of BECs in the "trap-and-free fall" analogy of the HBT effect affects comparison.