Photon statistics of a single mode of amplified spontaneous emission noise in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier

The recently developed method of optical homodyne tomography (OHT) allows one to obtain the photon statistics of a single mode with single-photon resolution. Recently, we used OHT to prove the Bose Einstein distribution (BED) character of parametric fluorescence. In general, in an OHT setup, a weak signal beam is mixed on a 50/50 beamsplitter with a strong local oscillator beam of the same polarization and spatio-temporal mode. In this paper, we apply OHT to show, we believe for the first time, that ASE noise of a single mode in an EDFA is Bose-Einstein distributed.