We present photon-counting distributions of multimode squeezed light of bandwidth B. Such light, for example, is generated by the intracavity parametric down-converter of Wu et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 57, 2520 (1986)], which has now become a standard source for generating highly squeezed light. By expanding the electric-field operator into relevant modes over the counting interval T and applying the Bogoliubov transformation that generates squeezing, we calculate the photon-counting distributions under both BT≫1 and BT≪1 conditions. We find that the probability for counting an odd number of photons is identically zero under the former condition, whereas the latter is equivalent to having a photodetector with quantum efficiency that is much less than unity.

• Received 22 March 1989

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.40.1670