Nearly sixty year ago, the pioneering Hanbury-Brown Twiss experiment with its ground-breaking investigations of the intensity correlations of light set fundaments in modern quantum optics. The key message condensed into a paradigm of quantum optics states that spectrally broad-band, incoherent emission from a thermal source based on sponta-neously emitted photons always exhibits an enhanced central intensity correlation coefficient of two, equivalent to photon bunching, whereas the stimulated laser emission shows one of unity accompanied by Poissonian statistics. Recently, we discovered that there exists a novel exciting photon state realized in the regime of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) emitted by quantum dot based superlumi-nescent diodes (SLDs), which contains ingredients from both spontaneous and stimulated emission. Via a modified new Hanbury-Brown & Twiss experiment, we demonstrated that this new hybrid state of light is simultaneously spectrally broad-band, i.e. incoherent in first order reflected by the large spectral bandwidth and exhibits a laser-like intensity correlation coefficient of 1.33 equivalent to high coherence in second order, thus being at the same time thermal and coherent. In the talk, I shall review and discuss these experimental results and complement them with new experiments based on tailored coherence by applying well-controlled optical feedback onto the SLDs. The experimental findings are finally supported by a theoretical ansatz based on a "phase randomized superposition of Gaussian state modes (PRAG)" description. These investigations provide both new insight into quantum optics and open new avenues towards improved imaging applications as, e.g. optical coherence tomography.