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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Pacific Rim (CLEO-PR)

Quantum optical coherence tomography with true thermal light

Yanhua Zhai, Xi-Hao Chen, Jian-Ling Zhao, Kai-Hong Luo, Ling-An Wu

Published Aug 1, 2007• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We report a proof-of-principle experiment demonstrating quantum optical coherence tomography with a true thermal light source. The axial distance between two mirrors has been measured. Although the resolution is as yet low the method could conceivably be used to measure the structure of macroscopic objects.
DOI
10.1109/cleopr.2007.4391189

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We show an experimental study of two-photon imaging using thermal light sources. It is interesting to see that the thermal source behaves like a mirror producing an equal size reproduction of a chosen object. We refer to such mirror as "magic" because the ghost image produced by the mirror is real in the sense that it lies in the real space and can be further imaged by a camera or an equivalent optical system. We also show that it is possible to overcome the main limitation towards the actual implementation of thermal light two-photon imaging, i.e. the poor contrast of the imaging pattern, by designing an appropriate correlation measurement scheme that is insensitive to the uncorrelated background noise.
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We demonstrate phase-conjugate optical coherence tomography (PC-OCT) using a classical source of phase-sensitive cross-correlated beams to achieve measurement improvements shared by quantum OCT (Q-OCT): a factor-of-2 enhancement in axial resolution and even-order dispersion cancellation. Compared with coincidence counting used in Q-OCT, PC-OCT employs standard photodetection that results in much faster data acquisitions. This work belongs to a new class of classical techniques inspired by quantum methods that have advantages once thought to be exclusively quantum mechanical.