Weak Thermal State Quadrature-Noise Shadow Imaging
arXiv:2202.02231 · doi:10.1364/OE.455646
Abstract
In this work, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate the possibility to create an image of an opaque object using a few-photon thermal optical field. We utilize the Quadrature-Noise Shadow Imaging (QSI) technique that detects the changes in the quadrature-noise statistics of the probe beam after its interaction with an object. We show that such thermal QSI scheme has an advantage over the classical differential imaging when the effect of dark counts is considered. At the same time, the easy availability of thermal sources for any wavelength makes the method practical for broad range of applications, not accessible with, e.g. quantum squeezed light. As a proof of principle, we implement this scheme by two different light sources: a pseudo-thermal beam generated by rotating ground glass (RGG) method and a thermal beam generated by Four-Wave Mixing (FWM) method. The RGG method shows simplicity and robustness of QSI scheme while the FWM method validates theoretical signal-to-noise ratio predictions. Finally, we demonstrate low-light imaging abilities with QSI by imaging a biological specimen on a CCD camera, detecting as low as 0.03 photons on average per pixel per 1.7 microseconds exposure.
9 pages, 7 figures
References in corpus (9)
- Experimental realization of sub-shot-noise quantum imaging
- Imaging with a small number of photons
- Strong low-frequency quantum correlations from a four-wave mixing amplifier
- Realisation of the first sub shot noise wide field microscope
- Quantum imaging with sub-Poissonian light: challenges and perspectives in optical metrology
- High-sensitivity imaging with multi-mode twin beams
- Transmission Estimation at the Cramér-Rao Bound for Squeezed States of Light in the Presence of Loss and Imperfect Detection
- Quantum-Limited Squeezed Light Detection with a Camera
- Low-Light Shadow Imaging using Quantum-Noise Detection with a Camera