Interference lies at the heart of the behavior of classical and quantum light. It is thus crucial to understand the boundaries between which interference patterns can be explained by a classical electromagnetic description of light and which, on the other hand, can only be understood with a proper quantum mechanical approach. While the case of two-mode interference has received a lot of attention, the multimode case has not yet been fully explored. Here we study a general scenario of intensity interferometry: we derive a bound on the average correlations between pairs of output intensities for the classical wavelike model of light, and we show how it can be violated in a quantum framework. As a consequence, this violation acts as a nonclassicality witness, able to detect the presence of sources with sub-Poissonian photon-number statistics. We also develop a criterion that can certify the impossibility of dividing a given interferometer into two independent subblocks.

• Received 29 April 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.213602

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society