Ghost Diffraction in Time Domain: Two-Photon Reciprocal Two-Slit Diffraction-Interference

Abstract: Temporal ghost diffraction (TGD) is observed by taking two-photon cross-correlation in the configuration of reciprocal two-slit diffraction (2SD) where interference fringes develop on the light source side as opposed to the detector side. To this end, a narrow-band chaotic light source and a gated detector are used in the frequency-time domain, which emulate a randomly pointing incoherent light source and a stationary pinhole detector in the momentum-space domain, respectively. Spectral fringes with visibility that closely follows a sinc function of spectral bandwidth are clear evidence that legitimate TGD fringes due to two-photon interference develop even with classical light.