We report the first experimental observation of quantum holographic imaging with entangled photon pairs, generated in a spontaneous parametric down-conversion process. The signal photons play both roles of object wave and reference wave in holography
but are recorded by a point detector providing only encoding information, while the idler photons travel freely and are locally manipulated with spatial resolution. The holographic image is formed by the two-photon correlation measurement, although both the signal and idler beams are incoherent. According to the detection regime of the signal photons, we analyze three types of quantum holography schemes: point detection, coherent detection and bucket detection, which can correspond to classical holography using a point source, a plane-wave coherent source and a spatially incoherent source, respectively. Our experiment demonstrates that the two-photon holography in the point detection regime is equivalent to the one-photon holography using a point source. Physically, the quantum holography experiment verifies that a pair of non-commutable physical quantities, the amplitude and phase components of the field operator, can be nonlocally measured through two-photon entanglement.
We report an experimental observation of quantum Airy disk diffraction pattern using an entangled two-photon source. In contrast to the previous quantum lithography experiments where the subwavelength diffraction patterns were observed in the far fie
ld limit, we perform the Fraunhofer diffraction experiment with a convex lens. The experimental result shows that the two-photon Airy disk is provided with the super-resolution spot, which surpasses the classical diffraction limit. In particular, the spot size can be well controlled by the focal length, which adapted to optical super-focusing. Our experiment can promote potential application of quantum lithography.
