title: Thermal light cannot be represented as a statistical mixture of single pulses.
abstract: We ask whether or not thermal light can be represented as a mixture of single broadband coherent pulses. We find that it cannot. Such a mixture is simply not rich enough to mimic thermal light; indeed, it cannot even reproduce the first-order correlation function. We show that it is possible to construct a modified mixture of single coherent pulses that does yield the correct first-order correlation function at equal space points. However, as we then demonstrate, such a mixture cannot reproduce the second-order correlation function.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, 80 Saint George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H6, Canada.
authors.forename: Aurélia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chenu
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, 80 Saint George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H6, Canada.|Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 2Y5, Canada.
authors.forename: Agata M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Brańczyk
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Centre for Quantum Information and Quantum Control, 80 Saint George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3H6, Canada.|Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Washington Road, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
authors.forename: Gregory D
authors.initials: GD
authors.lastname: Scholes
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, 60 Saint George Street, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5R 3C3, Canada.
authors.forename: J E
authors.initials: JE
authors.lastname: Sipe