Observing the transition from quantum to classical energy correlations with photon pairs

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate a method to control the relative amount of quantum and classical energy correlations between two photons from a pair emitted by spontaneous parametric downconversion. Decoherence in the energy basis is achieved by applying random spectral phases on the photons. As a consequence a diverging temporal second order correlation function is observed and is explained by a mixture between an energy entangled pure state and a fully classically correlated mixte state.