Thermal light

For a single mode in thermal equilibrium, its quantum harmonic oscillator energy ladder gives a geometric distributionIts probability generating function is $F(z)=(1-q)/(1-qz)$. Differentiating twice gives $F^{\prime \prime }(1)=2q^2/(1-q{)}^2=2{\mu }^2$, hence $g^{(2)}(0)=2$. At the chosen mean $\mu =2$, $q=2/3$, $p_0=1/3$, $p_1=2/9$, $p_2=4/27$, and $\mathrm{Var}N=6$. Rare high occupations increase the pair count even though the mean matches the other preparations. The geometric weights also arise from a Gaussian mixture of coherent states.^[ref]

Single-mode selection is essential to this factor of two. If $M$ independent equally populated thermal modes are collected together, let $N={\sum }_{j=1}^M{N}_j$ with $⟨N_j⟩=\mu /M$. Adding their variances gives $\mathrm{Var}N=\mu +{\mu }^2/M$, hence $g^{(2)}(0)=1+1/M$. Averaging over many unresolved modes can make thermal pair counts approach the independent-count reference.