Efficient Production of Photon Bunching From Laser Light for Rangefinding

Temporal photon bunching is the phenomena in which photons tend to cluster together on a short time scale. This effect can be quantified using the second order coherence <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$g^{(2)}(\tau)$</tex> of the light. Photon bunching has been utilized in LIDAR, ghost imaging and simulating star light. In these applications, bunched light is typically generated inefficiently by sending coherent laser light through a phase randomization media, such as a rotating ground glass [1] or a liquid suspension of microspheres [2].