Practical and Cost-Effective Approach for Thermal Light Characterization Based on Confined Area Measurements

Photon statistics and optical coherence measurements are essential in understanding light sources’ properties and behaviors. However, the measurement setups require sophisticated detectors with short integration times. Otherwise, the results are indeed time average, which poses a significant challenge, particularly for thermal light sources due to their very short coherence times. In this article, we present a novel, practical, and low-cost measurement procedure for characterizing photon statistics and the second-order coherence function of thermal light using an ordinary charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. We focus on single-pixel analysis through the experiments since measurements of randomly distributed light in a confined region follow Bose-Einstein statistics. This way, the likelihood of averaging during detection is reduced, allowing us to extract statistical information from the spatially distributed intensity values. The outcomes prove the effectiveness of confined area measurements method by overcoming the detector’s long exposure time issue.