Photon antibunching

Photon antibunching generally refers to a light field with photons more equally spaced than a coherent laser field, a signature being signals at appropriate detectors which are anticorrelated. More specifically, it can refer to sub-Poissonian photon statistics, that is a photon number distribution for which the variance is less than the mean. Nevertheless this kind of statistics was not observed directly with photon number resolving detector. A coherent state, as output by a laser far above threshold has Poissonian statistics yielding random photon spacing; while a thermal light field has super-Poissonian statistics and yields bunched photon spacing. In the thermal (bunched) case, the number of fluctuations is larger than a coherent state; for an antibunched source they are smaller.