Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter

Elie Vandoolaeghe; Iñigo Lasheras; Chirag Vaswani; Sampriti Saha; Purbasha Ray; Takashi Taniguchi; Kenji Watanabe; Prasana Sahoo; Nicolò Defenu; Thibault Chervy; Puneet A. Murthy

arXiv · 2605.28623

Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter

Elie Vandoolaeghe·Iñigo Lasheras·Chirag Vaswani·Sampriti Saha·Purbasha Ray·Takashi Taniguchi·Kenji Watanabe·Prasana Sahoo·Nicolò Defenu·Thibault Chervy·Puneet A. Murthy

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Abstract

Light and matter share fundamental statistical properties, yet the experimental probes of quantum optics and many-body physics have largely evolved along separate trajectories. While many-body physics explores emergent collective phenomena, quantum optics has refined the measurement of correlations between individual photons. Here, we introduce photon correlation microscopy (PCM) - which bridges the two domains by leveraging correlations of emitted light to probe the correlations in quantum matter at mesoscopic scales. We demonstrate this approach using a one-dimensional (1D) ensemble of dipolar excitons confined at a lateral monolayer MoSe$_2$-WSe$_2$ heterojunction. We use gate-defined potentials to confine the 1D excitons to a mesoscopic lengthscale to enhance the visibility of matter correlations in the emitted photon field. Power-dependent spectroscopy reveals a transition from a compressible to an incompressible phase, signaled by the simultaneous saturation of the emission intensity and energy blueshift, which is supported by numerical simulations. Through this crossover, photon correlation measurements show a striking evolution from bunching at low densities to antibunching at high densities. This constitutes a many-body blockade of photon emission emerging directly from a number-stabilized state, driven by collective dipolar repulsion. Our results establish PCM as a powerful probe of many-body physics through the lens of quantum optics, extensible to a broad class of correlated electronic phases, while pointing toward a route to generating non-classical light through many-body correlations.

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Elie Vandoolaeghe, Iñigo Lasheras, Chirag Vaswani, Sampriti Saha, Purbasha Ray, Takashi Taniguchi, Kenji Watanabe, Prasana Sahoo, Nicolò Defenu, Thibault Chervy, Puneet A. Murthy. 2026-05-27. Photon correlation microscopy of quantum matter. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28623

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