Photoelectron statistics due to mixing of different types of fields

The probability-generating functions for the number of electrons ejected from a photodetector by an incident light beam, which is a mixture of coherent signals and other kinds of light beams, are arrived at by using a generalized cumulant expansion method. It is found that a knowledge of the statistical correlation properties of the mixing beams is necessary to deduce the resulting distributions. © 1972 Società Italiana di Fisica.