FIELD-THEORETICAL TREATMENT OF PHOTOMIXING
Malvin Carl Teich · Applied Physics Letters · 1969
A quantum theory of photomixing is developed in which double- and sum-frequency signal components do not appear, when hν ≫ kT, in distinction to the classical theory. Optimum sinusoidal photomixing occurs for a first-order coherent total incident field with stationary constituent beams. The heterodyne process may be viewed as the annihilation of a single nonmonochromatic photon. An interpretation is given to temporal interference experiments at the single-photon level recently performed by Radloff.