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Chinese Physics Letters

Visibility and Resolution Enhancement of Fourth-Order Ghost Interference with Thermal Light

Feng Wen, Xun Zhang, Chenzhi Yuan, Changbiao Li, Jing-Da Wang, Yanpeng Zhang

Published Jan 1, 2015• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A scheme for fourth-order double-slit ghost interference with a pseudo-thermal light source is proposed. It is shown that not only can the visibility be dramatically enhanced compared to the third-order case, but also higher resolution is demonstrated if we scan two of three reference detectors in opposite directions with the same speed, meanwhile another two in identical directions where the speed of one reference detector is twice the other. The results show that the visibility and resolution improvement of the fourth-order ghost interference fringe can be applied to the N th-order ghost imaging.

DOI
10.1088/0256-307x/32/1/014207

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A scheme for fourth-order double-slit ghost interference with a pseudo-thermal light source is proposed. It is shown that not only can the visibility be dramatically enhanced compared to the third-order case, but also higher resolution is demonstrated if we scan two of three reference detectors in opposite directions with the same speed, meanwhile another two in identical directions where the speed of one reference detector is twice the other. The results show that the visibility and resolution improvement of the fourth-order ghost interference fringe can be applied to the N th-order ghost imaging.
Third-order Hanbrury Brown—Twiss and double-slit interference experiments with a pseudo-thermal light are performed by recording intensities in single, double and triple optical paths, respectively. The experimental results verifies the theoretical prediction that the indispensable condition for achieving a interference pattern or ghost image in N th-order intensity correlation measurements is the synchronous detection of the same light field by each reference detector, no matter the intensities recorded in one, or two, or N optical paths. It is shown that, when the reference detectors are scanned in the opposite directions, the visibility and resolution of the third-order spatial correlation function of thermal light is much better than that scanned in the same direction, but it is no use for obtaining the N th-order interference pattern or ghost image in the thermal N th-order interference or ghost imaging.
The arbitrary Nth-order intensity correlation measurement with thermal light is both theoretically and experimentally investigated. In a double-slit interference scheme with thermal light, we compare the results for higher- and lower-order intensity correlation and demonstrate that the visibility of the interference pattern can be dramatically enhanced while the resolution can also be improved when the order N becomes larger. The experimental results are in agreement with our theoretical analysis.
A third-order double-slit interference experiment with a pseudothermal light source in the high-intensity limit has been performed by actually recording the intensities in three optical paths. It is shown that not only can the visibility be dramatically enhanced compared to the second-order case as previously theoretically predicted and shown experimentally, but also that the higher visibility is a consequence of the contribution of third-order correlation interaction terms, which is equal to the sum of all contributions from second-order correlation. It is interesting that, when the two reference detectors are scanned in opposite directions, negative values for the third-order correlation term of the intensity fluctuations may appear. The phenomenon can be completely explained by the theory of classical statistical optics and is the first concrete demonstration of the influence of the third-order correlation terms.
We theoretically discuss the four-photon spatial correlation property under different detection schemes. Compared with the two- and three-photon spatial correlation of thermal light source, we found that the enhancement in the visibility and the contrast when the fourth-order spatial correlation function is measured with quadruple coincidence measurement in the single photon counting regime. The resolution, however, is not changed when we scan three of four detectors with identical speed and direction. But if we scan two of three detectors in opposite directions and same speed, simultaneously, other two in identical direction and speed of one detector is twice of that of the other, we can see that both the contrast and resolution are improved significantly. We also show that the conclusion can be applied to the Nth-order ghost imaging.
Abstract We theoretically discuss the fourth-order spatial correlation and four-photon bunching properties of pseudo-thermal light in the photon counting regime. It is found that four-photon bunching has the maximum correlation. If they all come from the same spatial cell in phase space, then fourth-order spatial correlation can be decomposed into not only auto-correlation and cross-correlation of second- and third- order, but the pure correlations among four photons as well, which is just the four-photon bunching. In addition, we also show that the contribution from four-photon bunching leads to the enhancement of the resolution and visibility in fourth-order ghost imaging. More precisely, the contribution from four-photon bunching to fourth-order spatial correlation is equal to the sum of all contributions from two-photon bunching and three-photon bunching when three reference detectors are scanned along the identical orientation and speed. On the other hand, the sum of all contributions from two-photon bunching and three-photon bunching to fourth-order spatial correlation will exceed the contribution from four-photon bunching, when two of three reference detectors are scanned in the same orientation and the speed of one reference detector is twice that of the other; meanwhile, the other two reference detectors are moved with opposite orientation but identical speed.
In this paper, we propose a theoretical scheme of many-ghost imaging in terms of NNNth-order correlated thermal light. We obtain the Gaussian thin lens equations in the many-ghost imaging protocol. We show that it is possible to produce $N\ensuremath{-}1$ ghost images of an object at different places in a nonlocal fashion by means of a higher order correlated imaging process with an NNNth-order correlated thermal source and correlation measurements. We investigate the visibility of the ghost images in the scheme and obtain the upper bounds of the visibility for the NNNth-order correlated thermal-light ghost imaging. It is found that the visibility of the ghost images can be dramatically enhanced when the order of correlation becomes larger. It is pointed out that the many-ghost imaging phenomenon is an observable physical effect induced by higher order coherence or higher order correlations of optical fields.