Hanbury-Brown Twiss effect, squeezed gravitons and the photon correlations

Abstract

Unlike the gravitational waves classically generated by moving macroscopic masses, the diffuse backgrounds of gravitons originate most likely from zero-point fluctuations of the gravitational field amplified by the evolution of the space-time curvature. The resulting entangled states lead to specific second-order correlation effects that could be eventually detected. For a quantitative analysis of this empirical expectation we scrutinize the interactions between the cosmic gravitons and the fundamental mode of a quantized electromagnetic field confined inside a closed optical resonator with perfectly-reflecting walls. We show that the Hanbury-Brown Twiss correlations of the photons are insensitive to the degrees of second-order coherence of the gravitons even barring for the exceedingly small couplings of the problem. Since the degree of second-order coherence of the photons does not reflect the correlation properties of the gravitons, the statistical properties of the gravitons (and their super-Poissonian statistics) cannot be inferred, even in principle, from the intensity correlations of the cavity modes.