Coherent imaging of a pure phase object with classical incoherent light

Abstract

By using the ghost imaging technique, we experimentally demonstrate the reconstruction of the diffraction pattern of a {\em pure phase} object by using the classical correlation of incoherent thermal light split on a beam splitter. The results once again underline that entanglement is not a necessary feature of ghost imaging. The light we use is spatially highly incoherent with respect to the object ($\approx 2\mu$m speckle size) and is produced by a pseudo-thermal source relying on the principle of near-field scattering. We show that in these conditions no information on the phase object can be retrieved by only measuring the light that passed through it, neither in a direct measurement nor in a Hanbury Brown-Twiss (HBT) scheme. In general, we show a remarkable complementarity between ghost imaging and the HBT scheme when dealing with a phase object.

13 pages, 11 figures. Published in Physical Review A. Replaced version fixes some problems with Figs. 1, 4 and 10

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Lensless Fourier-Transform Ghost Imaging with Classical Incoherent Light
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• Intensity interferometry for holography with quantum and classical light
• Spatial Interference: From Coherent To Incoherent
• Multiphoton communication in lossy channels with photon-number entangled states
• Schmidt-like coherent mode decomposition and spatial intensity correlations of thermal light
• Sub-wavelength Coherent Imaging of a Pure-Phase Object with Thermal Light
• Transmission area and two-photon correlated imaging
• Ghost imaging for an occluded object
• Collective effects in the photon statistics of thermal atomic ensembles
• Lateral Effects in Fermion Antibunching
• Complex Acquisition of the Fourier Transform Imaging of an Arbitrary Object