No Arabic abstract
As one of important analysis tools, microscopes with high spatial resolution are indispensable for scientific research and medical diagnosis, and much attention is always focused on the improvement of resolution. Over the past decade, a novel technique called ghost imaging has been developed that may provide a new approach toward increasing the resolution of an imaging system. In this paper, we introduce this technique into microscopes for the first time and report a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of a microscope scheme based on ghost imaging.
For conventional imaging, shaking of the imaging system or the target leads to the degradation of imaging resolution. In this work, the influence of the targets shaking to fourier-transform ghost diffraction (FGD) is investigated. The analytical results, which are backed up by numerical simulation and experiments, demonstrate that the quiver of target has no effect on the resolution of FGD, thus the targets imaging with high spatial resolution can be always achieved by phase-retrieval method from the FGD patterns. This approach can be applied in high-precision imaging systems, to overcome the influence of the systems shaking to imaging resolution.
For ghost imaging, pursuing high resolution images and short acquisition times required for reconstructing images are always two main goals. We report an image reconstruction algorithm called compressive sampling (CS) reconstruction to recover ghost images. By CS reconstruction, ghost imaging with both super-resolution and a good signal-to-noise ratio can be obtained via short acquisition times. Both effect influencing and approaches further improving the resolution of ghost images via CS reconstruction, relationship between ghost imaging and CS theory are also discussed.
High-resolution ghost image and ghost diffraction experiments are performed by using a single source of thermal-like speckle light divided by a beam splitter. Passing from the image to the diffraction result solely relies on changing the optical setup in the reference arm, while leaving untouched the object arm. The product of spatial resolutions of the ghost image and ghost diffraction experiments is shown to overcome a limit which was formerly thought to be achievable only with entangled photons.
Much more image details can be resolved by improving the systems imaging resolution and enhancing the resolution beyond the systems Rayleigh diffraction limit is generally called super-resolution. By combining the sparse prior property of images with the ghost imaging method, we demonstrated experimentally that super-resolution imaging can be nonlocally achieved in the far field even without looking at the object. Physical explanation of super-resolution ghost imaging via compressive sampling and its potential applications are also discussed.
There has been an intense debate on the quantum versus classical origin of ghost imaging with a thermal light source over the last two decades. A lot of distinguished work has contributed to this topic, both theoretically and experimentally, however, to this day this quantum-classical dilemma still persists. Here we formulate for the first time a density matrix in the photon orbital angular momentum (OAM) Hilbert space to fully characterize the two-arm ghost imaging system with the basic definition of thermal light sources. Our formulation offers a mathematically precise method to describe the formation of a ghost image in a nonlocal fashion. More importantly, it provides a more physically intuitive picture to reveal the quantumness hidden in the thermal ghost imaging, and therefore, presenting a sound resolution to the ongoing quantum-classical dilemma, which distinguishes the quantum correlations beyond entanglement in terms of geometric measure of discord. Our work also suggests further studies of using thermal multi-photon OAM states directly to implement some quantum information tasks.