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

References in corpus (4)

• Correlated imaging, quantum and classical
• Coherent imaging with pseudo-thermal incoherent light
• Ghost imaging using homodyne detection
• Comment on "Entangled-Photon Imaging of a Pure Phase Object"

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• Transmission area and two-photon correlated imaging
• Lateral Effects in Fermion Antibunching