A proposal for obtaining optical resolution better than the classical limit by means of spatially entangled quantum states of light opens a new frontier in the fields of quantum optical imaging, metrology, and sensing.
Super-resolution techniques in microscopy are opening new frontiers in biology, and super-resolution for telescope imaging may provide similar benefits for astronomy and space domain awareness. Telescope super-resolution techniques such as multi-plane light conversion and photonic lanterns have been inspired by the ability of mode sorting measurements to extract classical Fisher information closer to the quantum bound than standard telescope imaging. Fisher information analyses for super-resolution imaging systems commonly consider the case of imaging point sources, but often only consider estimating a small subset of the parameters. Furthermore, there has been no demonstration of an estimation algorithm with performance that follows the limit set by the Fisher information when all point source parameters are considered. We provide a framework for defining and analyzing super-resolution using the classical and quantum Fisher information for the multi-parameter estimation problem and demonstrate an algorithm that can achieve the classical Fisher information bound for all the parameters simultaneously.
Wide-field quantum sensing and imaging with solid-state spins has attracted wide interest for its ability to detect relative physical quantities with high sensitivity at nanoscale. However, the optical diffraction limit hinders the improvement in spatial resolution. In this work, we utilize blind structured illumination microscopy to perform wide-field quantum sensing with nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond. Without the requirement of prior knowledge of excitation light field, the spatial resolution of NV centers imaging is enhanced by 1.8-fold in comparison with conventional microscopy. Combined with spin manipulation and detection, super-resolution NV center sensing is subsequently performed to reveal the optical and electrical properties of nanodevice. The high spatial resolution and feasibility of this work will promote the applications of quantum sensing in nanoscience.