UC Irvine

Quantum optical fields offer numerous control knobs which are not available with classical light and may be used for monitoring the properties of matter by novel types of spectroscopy. It has been recently argued that such quantum spectroscopy signals can be obtained by a simple averaging of their classical spectroscopy counterparts over the Glauber-Sudarshan quasiprobability distribution of the quantum field; the quantum light thus merely provides a novel gating window for the classical response functions. We show that this argument only applies to the linear response and breaks down in the nonlinear regime. The quantum response carries additional valuable information about response and spontaneous fluctuations of matter that may not be retrieved from the classical response by simple data processing. This is connected to the lack of a nonlinear fluctuation-dissipation relation.