Simulation of photon antibunching

We prove a correspondence in between the influence of nonlinear interaction on photon number fluctuations and the influence of an appropriately designed filter device on intensity fluctuations in light fields. This correspondence allows us to study the change of the degree of photon bunching in nonlinear processes by performing an analog experiment, in which we measure intensity distributions instead of photon number distributions. Results are reported both for an enhancement and for a reduction of the widths of the initial distributions, depending on the type of the interaction as well as on the type of the initial distribution.Work supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft within the program Optik und Information