Interferometry with Photon-Subtracted Thermal Light

Abstract

We propose and implement a quantum procedure for enhancing the sensitivity with which one can determine the phase shift experienced by a weak light beam possessing thermal statistics in passing through an interferometer. Our procedure entails subtracting exactly one (which can be generalized to m) photons from the light field exiting an interferometer containing a phase-shifting element in one of its arms. As a consequence of the process of photon subtraction, and somewhat surprisingly, the mean photon number and signal-to-noise ratio of the resulting light field are thereby increased, leading to enhanced interferometry. This method can be used to increase measurement sensitivity in a variety of practical applications, including that of forming the image of an object illuminated only by weak thermal light.

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Cited by in corpus (20)

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• Conceptual understanding through efficient inverse-design of quantum optical experiments
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• Generator of arbitrary classical photon statistics
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• Multiphoton Quantum Imaging using Natural Light
• Statistical parameter estimation of multimode multiphoton subtracted thermal states of light
• Noise-robust single-pixel imaging in photon counting regime with a pulsed source
• The direct test of the absence of the "quantum vampire's" shadow with use of thermal light
• Observation of anomalous classical-to-quantum transitions in many-body systems
• Theoretical and experimental study of multi-mode thermal states with subtraction of a random number of photons
• Differences and similarities between lasing and multiple-photon subtracted states
• Quantifying classical and quantum bounds for resolving closely spaced, non-interacting, simultaneously emitting dipole sources in optical microscopy