No Arabic abstract
Interferometers are widely used in imaging technologies to achieve enhanced spatial resolution, but require that the incoming photons be indistinguishable. In previous work, we built and analyzed color erasure detectors which expand the scope of intensity interferometry to accommodate sources of different colors. Here we experimentally demonstrate how color erasure detectors can achieve improved spatial resolution in an imaging task, well beyond the diffraction limit. Utilizing two 10.9 mm-aperture telescopes and a 0.8 m baseline, we measure the distance between a 1063.6 nm source and a 1064.4 nm source separated by 4.2 mm at a distance of 1.43 km, which surpasses the diffraction limit of a single telescope by about 40 times. Moreover, chromatic intensity interferometry allows us to recover the phase of the Fourier transform of the imaged objects - a quantity that is, in the presence of modest noise, inaccessible to conventional intensity interferometry.
The time-frequency structure of quantum light can be manipulated for information processing and metrology. Characterizing this structure is also important for developing quantum light sources with high modal purity that can interfere with other independent sources. Here, we present and experimentally demonstrate a scheme based on intensity interferometry to measure the joint spectral mode of photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. We observe correlations in the spectral phase of the photons due to chirp in the pump. We also show that our scheme can be combined with stimulated emission tomography to quickly measure their mode using bright classical light. Our scheme does not require phase stability, nonlinearities, or spectral shaping, and thus is an experimentally simple way of measuring the modal structure of quantum light.
By developing a `two-crystal method for color erasure, we can broaden the scope of chromatic interferometry to include optical photons whose frequency difference falls outside of the 400 nm to 4500 nm wavelength range, which is the passband of a PPLN crystal. We demonstrate this possibility experimentally, by observing interference patterns between sources at 1064.4 nm and 1063.6 nm, corresponding to a frequency difference of about 200 GHz.
A pairwise correlation function in relative momentum space is discussed as a tool to characterize the properties of an incoherent source of non-interacting Abelian anyons. This is analogous to the Hanbury--Brown Twiss effect for particles with fractional statistics in two dimensions. In particular, using a flux tube model for anyons, the effects of source shape and quantum statistics on a two-particle correlation function are examined. Such a tool may prove useful in the context of quantum computing and other experimental applications where studying anyon sources are of interest.
The present articlereports on the first spatial intensity interferometry measurements on stars since the observations at Narrabri Observatory by Hanbury Brown et al. in the 1970s. Taking advantage of the progresses in recent years on photon-counting detectors and fast electronics, we were able to measure the zero-time delay intensity correlation $g^{(2)}(tau = 0, r)$ between the light collected by two 1-m optical telescopes separated by 15 m. Using two marginally resolved stars ($alpha$ Lyr and $beta$ Ori) with R magnitudes of 0.01 and 0.13 respectively, we demonstrate that 4-hour correlation exposures provide reliable visibilities, whilst a significant loss of contrast is found on alpha Aur, in agreement with its binary-star nature.
We consider the problem of estimating the spatial separation between two mutually incoherent point light sources using the super-resolution imaging technique based on spatial mode demultiplexing with noisy detectors. We show that in the presence of noise the resolution of the measurement is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the minimum resolvable spatial separation has a characteristic dependence of $sim$SNR$^{-1/2}$. Several detection techniques, including direct photon counting, as well as homodyne and heterodyne detection are considered.