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Physical Review A

Enhanced visibility of ghost imaging and interference using squeezed thermal light

Ruifeng Liu, Aiping Fang, Yu Zhou, Pei Zhang, Shaoyan Gao, Hongrong Li, Hong Gao, Fuli Li

Published Jan 13, 2016• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Ghost imaging and interference using squeezed thermal light are investigated. We show that squeezed thermal light can have a very strong photon-bunching effect in the region of very weak squeezing and thermal excitation. As a result, the visibility of the image and interference pattern can be greatly enhanced and raised to be much higher than the limitation $1/3$ to thermal light. In the squeezed vacuum case, especially, the visibility can approach to the level of entangled photon pairs from spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The present investigation may open a new potential application of squeezed light.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.93.013822

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Ghost imaging and interference using squeezed thermal light are investigated. We show that squeezed thermal light can have a very strong photon-bunching effect in the region of very weak squeezing and thermal excitation. As a result, the visibility of the image and interference pattern can be greatly enhanced and raised to be much higher than the limitation 1/31/31/3 to thermal light. In the squeezed vacuum case, especially, the visibility can approach to the level of entangled photon pairs from spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The present investigation may open a new potential application of squeezed light.
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.
The intrinsic higher-order correlation of intensities which gives a measure of ``pure'' correlations among photons (corresponding to multiphoton bunching) is investigated with regard to ghost imaging with thermal light. The synchronous detection of the same light field by all reference detectors, which is a necessary condition for achieving an NthN\text{th}Nth-order ghost image based on NNN-photon bunching, is discussed. Furthermore, it is found that the enhanced high visibility of NthN\text{th}Nth-order ghost imaging is a consequence of the contribution of NNN-photon bunching, which is not a small value but is equal to the sum of all contributions from $(N\ensuremath{-}1)$-photon bunching. These results differ from those obtained by certain other groups.
Thermal light by nature exhibits the well-known photon bunching effect with the zero-delay second-order correlation coefficient g(2){g}^{(2)}g(2) ideally equal to 2. The Photon extra-bunching effect, as a special class of the superbunching effect (g(2)>2{g}^{(2)}>2g(2)>2), describes the enhanced photon correlation (g(2)=3{g}^{(2)}=3g(2)=3) through the interference of bright twin beams produced in the spontaneous parametric down-conversion. In this work, we report that this effect can exist in classical beams and that g(2){g}^{(2)}g(2) can approach 4 in some extended extreme models. We experimentally demonstrate the nontrivial extra-bunching correlation ($\ensuremath{\sim}1.4\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}$ gain) in pairwise-generated holographic thermal light beams with a Dove prism-embedded balanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The interaction of such a pair of conjugated thermal light beams can generate a pair of uncorrelated superthermal light beams, enabling ghost imaging and Young's intensity interference with enhanced visibility. The quantum-inspired interference-induced spatial extra-bunching effect provides novel insights into inducing superbunching correlation in classical light and holds the potential for application in the coherent two-photon Lidar system to enhance sensitivity.
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We propose an interaction-free ghost imaging scheme based on a thermal light source. The scheme exploits the quantum Zeno effect to suppress photon absorption by the sample and thus light-induced damage. Crucially, this suppression requires only that the interfering paths be distinguishable in principle; no quantum detection or measurement results are needed, thereby removing the requirement for single-photon detectors. Moreover, our scheme is built on high-intensity thermal illumination. This is the key difference between this work and traditional studies of interaction-free imaging relying on weak or single-photon illumination. We demonstrate that replacing entangled photon pairs with a thermal source can improve image quality without sacrificing the essence of interaction-free measurement. Consequently, our scheme achieves quantum Zeno effect-based enhancement of the imaging performance without requiring specialized quantum hardware such as entangled photon sources or single-photon detectors. We further show active suppression of background noise via controllable photon loss. Our work offers a practical and cost-effective route to non-destructive, high-quality imaging for light-sensitive samples in fields such as life sciences.