Photon Statistics of Propagating Thermal Microwaves

  1. J. Goetz,
  2. S. Pogorzalek,
  3. F. Deppe,
  4. K. G. Fedorov,
  5. P. Eder,
  6. M. Fischer,
  7. F. Wulschner,
  8. E. Xie,
  9. A. Marx,
  10. and R. Gross
In experiments with superconducting quantum circuits, characterizing the photon statistics of propagating microwave fields is a fundamental task. We quantify the n2+n photon number variance of thermal microwave photons emitted from a black-body radiator for mean photon numbers 0.05≲n≲1.5. We probe the fields using either correlation measurements or a transmon qubit coupled to a microwave resonator. Our experiments provide a precise quantitative characterization of weak microwave states and information on the noise emitted by a Josephson parametric amplifier.
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