Real applications of quantum imaging

Abstract

Abstract. In the last years the possibility of creating and manipulating quantum states of light has paved the way to the development of new technologies exploiting peculiar properties of quantum states, as quantum information, quantum metrology & sensing, quantum imaging ...In particular Quantum Imaging addresses the possibility of overcoming limits of classical optics by using quantum resources as entanglement or sub-poissonian statistics. Albeit quantum imaging is a more recent field than other quantum technologies, e.g. quantum information, it is now substantially mature for application. Several different protocols have been proposed, some of them only theoretically, others with an experimental implementation and a few of them pointing to a clear application. Here we present a few of the most mature protocols ranging from ghost imaging to sub shot noise imaging and sub Rayleigh imaging.

Linear and nonlinear optical effects in biophotonic structures using classical and nonclassical light

“…The quantum light is used to beat the limitations of classical light regarding diffraction limit and signal‐to‐noise ratio which are essential requirements for biologically oriented research. The archetypes of nonclassical light are entangled and squeezed light .…”

“…It exploits intensity correlation fluctuations for imaging an object. One spatially incoherent beam propagates through an object and is collected by a detector, called “bucket detector” that has no spatial resolution (Figure ) . The second correlated beam does not interact with the object and is collected by a spatially‐resolved detector, made of an array of pixels.…”

“…Scale bar, 400 μm. Modified from References and with permission from APS Publishing and Springer Nature, respectively…”

Heralded source of bright multi-mode mesoscopic sub-Poissonian light

“…At the SNL, completely uncorrelated particles follow a Poissonian distribution in their numbers. Light with noise properties suppressed below the SNL (squeezed light) plays an essential role in quantum metrology [1], quantum imaging [2,3], and quantum communication [4,5], and can be helpful in bio-sensing [6]. Significant interest in the multi-mode squeezed light stems from the possibility of improving the spatial resolution of optical images [7,8].…”

Observation of spatial quantum correlations in the macroscopic regime

“…To date, most of the attention has focused on the study of quantum noise reduction, or squeezing, in the temporal domain [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Nevertheless, many areas in quantum optics, specifically quantum metrology and quantum imaging, could greatly benefit from the study of the quantum correlations directly in the spatial domain [13][14][15]. This would make it possible to take advantage of the spatial quantum properties of light, such as spatial squeezing, for enhanced spatial resolution and sub shot noise imaging [14].…”