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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Quantum interferometry, entanglement, and holography

Bahaa E. A. Saleh, Ayman F. Abouraddy, Alexander V. Sergienko, Malvin Carl Teich

Published Nov 18, 2003• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Entangled-photon beams, generated for example by spontaneous parametric down-conversion from a nonlinear crystal, may be used to implement holography based on quantum interferometry. One beam is split into a probe component that illuminates the object and another serving as a reference, and is detected with no spatial resolution. The other beam is measured with full spatial resolution. The rate of two-photon coincidence contains full holographic information on the object. Since the beams are not monochromatic, this is a form of higher-order white light holography.

DOI
10.1117/12.525832

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Entangled-photon beams, generated for example by spontaneous parametric down-conversion from a nonlinear crystal, may be used to implement holography based on quantum interferometry. One beam is split into a probe component that illuminates the object and another serving as a reference, and is detected with no spatial resolution. The other beam is measured with full spatial resolution. The rate of two-photon coincidence contains full holographic information on the object. Since the beams are not monochromatic, this is a form of higher-order white light holography.
We report the experimental observation of quantum holographic imaging of one-dimensional object 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. Three types of quantum holography schemes are analyzed according to the detection regime of the signal photons.
Holography exploits the interference of a light field reflected/transmitted from an object with a reference beam to obtain a reconstruction of the spatial shape of the object. Classical holography techniques have been very successful in diverse areas such as microscopy, manufacturing technology, and basic science. However, detection constraints for wavelengths outside the visible range restrict the applications for imaging and sensing in general. For overcoming these detection limitations, we implement phase-shifting holography with nonclassical states of light, where we exploit quantum interference between two-photon probability amplitudes in a nonlinear interferometer. We demonstrate that it allows retrieving the spatial shape (amplitude and phase) of the photons transmitted/reflected from the object and thus obtaining an image of the object despite those photons are never detected. Moreover, there is no need to use a well-characterized reference beam, since the two-photon scheme already makes use of one of the photons as reference for holography.
Entangled photons, generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion from a second-order nonlinear crystal, present a rich potential for imaging and image-processing applications. Since this source is an example of a three-wave mixing process, there is more flexibility in the choices of illumination and detection wavelengths and in the placement of object(s) to be imaged. Moreover, this source is entangled, a fact that allows for imaging configurations and capabilities that cannot be achieved by use of classical sources of light. We examine a number of imaging and image-processing configurations that can be realized with this source. The formalism that we utilize facilitates the determination of the dependence of imaging resolution on the physical parameters of the optical arrangement.
This dissertation contains new theoretical work on how to utilize the entangled photons produced in a parametric down conversion to improve resolution and sensitivity in quantum interferometry, magnetometry and lithography. Chapter 1 introduces some basics of quantum imaging and sensing systems and gives an outline of the thesis. Chapter 2 deals with the use of entangled photons in Sagnac interferometry. We introduce the Sagnac ring interferometer and analyze the Sagnac phase shift with classical and quantum inputs of light. We compare the results obtained from entangled photon pairs input with classical and single-photon inputs. We show how the photon-photon correlation measurements increase the resolution and the sensitivity in the phase shift. In chapter three, we present an analysis of how parametric down-converted photons could be utilized in getting better spectroscopic information about a medium which has magnetic field induced anisotropy. We demonstrate how the improvement in magneto-optical rotation (MOR) of light could be realized by employing two different schemes with collinear and noncollinear down-conversion geometries compared to the use of coherent light. We calculate the resolution that can be achieved in the MOR's both by the use of coherent light and down-converted light. We discuss the possibility that the Heisenberg limit could be reached in magnetometry by the use of down-converted light. In chapter 4, we propose a new idea of using coherent beam stimulated parametric processes along with spontaneous ones to produce resolution improvement in two-photon interferometry. The stimulated processes enhance the count rate by several orders of magnitude while at the same time maintaining high visibility at large gains of the parametric process. We further find that the phases of coherent fields can also be used as tuning knobs to control the visibility of the pattern. We use coherent beams at the signal and idler frequencies as the seed light for the down-conversion process. In chapter 5, we analyze the minimum phase uncertainty of the phase measurement in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer using stimulated parametric down-conversion. We calculate the phase sensitivities for different measurement schemes. We conclude the thesis in chapter 6 and give an outlook for future work.
Quantum Imaging with Undetected Light (QIUL) leverages the quantum correlations of photon pairs, generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), to extract both the amplitude and phase information of an object [1]. This process facilitates the simultaneous illumination and detection across a diverse spectral range, harnessing advanced detection technology within the visible spectrum while probing the object at an unconventional wavelength. In this study, we provide an experimental scheme of a QIUL that merges Fourier off-axis holography with a hybrid-type induced-coherence nonlinear interferometer [2], [3], combining a March-Zender and Michelson interferometer to be able to angle-tune the object and reference beams in a wider range of values, and therefore accessing to the full capabilities offered by the Fourier space [4], [5]. Our methodology in a wide-field configuration requires only a single-shot to reconstruct the amplitude and phase data of an object, thus introducing a strong alternative to sequential multi-frame acquisition techniques such as digital phase-shifting holography [6]. Figure 1 shows the image reconstruction process to extract the amplitude and phase information out of the single-photon hologram, a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the hologram reveals the diffraction term containing the object information to be cropped and inverse Fourier transformed to extract a complex image from which the amplitude and phase are retrieved.