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

Quantum enhanced long baseline optical interferometers with noiseless linear amplification and displacement operation

Song Yang, Yun Su, Ningjuan Ruan, Zhiqiang Wu, Xuling Lin

Published Nov 3, 2016• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Long baseline optical interferometry, by combining the lights from widely-distributed telescopes, is shown to afford pronounced improvement in the imaging resolution in comparison with a single telescope. However, the noise and photon loss in the transmission between the telescopes would limit the length of baseline of interferometer to a few hundred meters. Here, we present a scheme for enhancement of long baseline optical interferometer by using quantum resources- noiseless linear amplifier (NLA) and displacement operation at the photon transmission channels. We exhibit this enhancement quantitatively by calculating higher fisher information compared with those of conventional optical interferometer.

DOI
10.1117/12.2247729

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Long baseline optical interferometry, by combining the lights from widely-distributed telescopes, is shown to afford pronounced improvement in the imaging resolution in comparison with a single telescope. However, the noise and photon loss in the transmission between the telescopes would limit the length of baseline of interferometer to a few hundred meters. Here, we present a scheme for enhancement of long baseline optical interferometer by using quantum resources- noiseless linear amplifier (NLA) and displacement operation at the photon transmission channels. We exhibit this enhancement quantitatively by calculating higher fisher information compared with those of conventional optical interferometer.
There has been much recent interest in quantum technology for applications to high resolution imaging and interference measurement. Due to noise and photon loss in the transmission between the telescopes, the current optical interferometers have quite limited baselines to a few hundred meters at most, which limit the resolutions. Here we propose to use noiseless linear amplifier (NLA) to reduce optical loss in the transmission. We also show that NLA can be further improved with local squeezing operator. We envisage that our analysis on this squeezing operator assisted NLA method could help to develop higher resolution interferometers, which would have many applications in stellar observation.
Long baseline weak-thermal-light interferometry is widely used for retrieving astronomical information from an array of telescopes. However, optic loss in the baseline severely limits the length of baseline and thus limits the resolution of interferometers. In this paper, we consider the elimination of optic loss with quantum noiseless linear amplification (NLA). With a success probability of 1.98×10−3, one could implement a 100 km long baseline interferometry via 1550 nm quantum communication. This shows the power quantum information technique and its application in astronomic interferometry. Finally, the comparison with recent entanglement-assisted method is also investigated.
A quantum-enhanced telescope (interferometer) can have significant advantages in precisely measuring the angular position of remote objects through sending out ancillary quantum entanglement pairs alongside the large baselines of telescopes. In principle, the larger the baseline, the higher the expected measurement resolution. However, the well-known major problem of photon transmission loss would drastically undermine the practical application of all quantum-enhanced telescopes and optical interferometers that transmit photons along the baseline, especially for the large baselines required for high angular resolution. Here, we propose a photon-transmission-loss-independent quantum-enhanced interferometer that is robust to the transmission loss and keeps its advantages unchanged given whatever large baseline. This removes the well-known barrier to the practical application of quantum-enhanced telescopes. Moreover, in contrast to the previous results of quantum-entanglement-enhanced telescopes requesting sophisticated resources—perfect single-photon entanglement, photon-number-resolving detectors, or quantum memories—our method requires only threshold detectors and tunable coherent-state or two-mode squeezed-state sources, which are mature technologies nowadays, and it does not need any quantum memory. We demonstrate the high performance of our method using Fisher information. For the phase difference of weak light from a remote star, the high-quality result of Fisher information remains constant under arbitrarily large transmission loss, and hence all the advantageous results and the performance of our method are actually independent of transmission loss.
In this Letter, we show that by combining quantum metrology and networking tools, it is possible to extend the baseline of an interferometric optical telescope and thus improve diffraction-limited imaging of point source positions. The quantum interferometer is based on single-photon sources, linear optical circuits, and efficient photon number counters. Surprisingly, with thermal (stellar) sources of low photon number per mode and high transmission losses across the baseline, the detected photon probability distribution still retains a large amount of Fisher information about the source position, allowing for a significant improvement in the resolution of positioning point sources, on the order of 10 μas. Our proposal can be implemented with current technology. In particular, our proposal does not require experimental optical quantum memories.
Astronomical observations allow us to better our understanding of the universe. As we observe smaller and more distance features, we run into the diffraction limit of our observation system. This limit is a function of the wavelength observed and the size of the primary aperture used. We can synthesize a larger primary aperture by implementing interferometry. Long baseline optical interferometry would lead to significant improvements in astronomical imaging resolution. Building optical interferometers with free space baselines becomes significantly more difficult as the baseline increases. A promising alternative is to use optical fiber to connect telescopes. Fiber-based interferometers are much more susceptible to phase noise than their free-space counterparts due to inhomogeneities in the fiber medium. This leads to significant degradation of interferometric signals used for astronomical measurements. We implement phase stabilization techniques used in quantum communications to stabilize an optical interferometer with a 170km pseudo-baseline. We use a quantum optimal measurement technique with this interferometer to resolve the extent of a source four times smaller than the diffraction limit of the system within 1.5% error. These results bring the potential for a full-scale on-sky long baseline interferometer significantly closer. A 350km baseline optical interferometer at 1550nm would allow us to resolve sub microarcsecond features in the universe.