Optimized detection of phase amplified light for imaging resolution improvement

Huang, Pao, Jovanović

Changchang Zhang, Zhaolu Wang, Wenjuan Shi +4 more

BI Si-wen, Hailong Zhu, Jingshi Du +5 more

As a combination of laser technology and modern photoelectric detection technology, lidar (laser radar) has notable advantages compared with traditional radar such as high resolution, strong anti-interference ability, and good low-altitude detection performance. However, with continuous application in aerospace, military, artificial intelligence and other fields, lidar has reached the limits of classical physics and can’t meet the requirements in detection, measurement and imaging. In order to break the bottleneck, worldwide researchers have developed a new type of radar-quantum lidar, which is based on the combination of traditional radar technology and quantum information technology. Its main principle is to get imaging through squeezed light that is below the noise limit of classical physics and then manipulated by the quantum state to achieve imaging with higher quality. Quantum lidar in the paper injects quantum squeezed light to receiver end and uses quantum phase-sensitive amplifier technology to compensate the photon loss that caused by insufficient quantum power to further improve resolution. In the squeezed light, the generation of quantum squeezed light and detection theory are studied, the resonant cavity locking principle and balanced homodyne detection principle are analyzed, and a mode cleaner with narrow line width is designed to improve beam transverse mode quality of laser and filter high frequency noise. In order to reduce quantum noise and improve resolution, quantum lidar imaging system is developed and the theoretically derivation and numerical simulation results show that the resolution of quantum lidar imaging is 1.71 times higher than that of lidar imaging.

Oo-Kaw Lim, Gideon Alon, Chao-Hsiang Chen +6 more

Mikhail I. Kolobov

Quantum imaging can be defined as an area of quantum optics that investigates the ultimate performance limits of optical imaging allowed by the quantum nature of light. Quantum Imaging techniques possess a high potential for improving the performance in recording, storage, and readout of optical images beyond the limits set by the standard quantum level of fluctuations known as the shot noise. This talk aims at giving an overview of the fundamentals of Quantum Imaging as well as its most important directions. We shall discuss generation of the spatially multimode squeezed states of light be means of a travelling-wave optical parametric amplifier. We shall demonstrate that this kind of light allows us to reduce the spatial fluctuations of the photocurrent in a properly chosen homodyne detection scheme with a highly efficient CCD camera. It will be shown that using the amplified quadrature of the light wave in a travelling-wave optical parametric amplifier, one can perform noiseless amplification of optical images. We shall provide recent experimental results demonstrating a single-shot noiseless image amplification by a pulsed optical parametric amplifier. One of important experimental achievements of Quantum Imaging, coined in the literature as quantum laser pointer, is a precise measurement of position and transverse displacement of a laser beam with resolution beyond the limit imposed by the shot noise. We shall describe briefly the idea of the experiment in which the transverse displacement of a laser beam was measured with resolution of the order of Angstrom. The problem of precise measurement of transverse displacement of a light beam brings us to a more general question about the quantum limits of optical resolution. The classical resolution criterion, derived in the nineteen century by Abbe and Rayleigh, states that the resolution of an optical instrument is limited by diffraction and is related to the wavelength of the light used in the imaging scheme. However, it was for a long time recognised in the literature that in some cases when one has some a priori information about the object, one can improve the resolution beyond the Rayleigh limit using the so-called super-resolution techniques. As a final topic in this talk, we shall discuss the quantum limits of optical super-resolution. In particular, we shall formulate the standard quantum limit of super-resolution and demonstrate how one can go beyond this limit using specially designed multimode squeezed light.

Huang, Jovanović