Increasing the information content of single photons

Tristan Bernhard Horst Tentrup, Thomas Hummel, Allard P. Mosk +1 more

Tristan Bernhard Horst Tentrup, Thomas Hummel, Allard P. Mosk +1 more

Randy A. Bartels, Gabe Murray, Jeffrey J. Field +1 more

A high-speed super-resolution computational imaging technique is introduced on the basis of classical and quantum correlation functions obtained from photon counts collected from quantum emitters illuminated by spatiotemporally structured illumination. The structured illumination is delocalized—allowing the selective excitation of separate groups of emitters as the modulation of the illumination light advances. A recorded set of photon counts contains rich quantum and classical information. By processing photon counts, multiple orders of Glauber correlation functions are extracted. Combinations of the normalized Glauber correlation functions convert photon counts into signals of increasing order that contain increasing spatial frequency information. However, the amount of information above the noise floor drops at higher correlation orders, causing a loss of accessible information in the finer spatial frequency content that is contained in the higher-order signals. We demonstrate an efficient and robust computational imaging algorithm to fuse the spatial frequencies from the low-spatial-frequency range that is available in the classical information with the spatial frequency content in the quantum signals. Because of the overlap of low spatial frequency information, the higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) information concentrated in the low spatial frequencies stabilizes the lower SNR at higher spatial frequencies in the higher-order quantum signals. Robust performance of this joint fusion of classical and quantum computational single-pixel imaging is demonstrated with marked increases in spatial frequency content, leading to super-resolution imaging, along with much better mean squared errors in the reconstructed images.

Robert Fickler, Geoff Campbell, B. C. Buchler +2 more

Photons with a twisted phase front carry a quantized amount of orbital angular momentum (OAM) and have become important in various fields of optics, such as quantum and classical information science or optical tweezers. Because no upper limit on the OAM content per photon is known, they are also interesting systems to experimentally challenge quantum mechanical prediction for high quantum numbers. Here, we take advantage of a recently developed technique to imprint unprecedented high values of OAM, namely spiral phase mirrors, to generate photons with more than 10,000 quanta of OAM. Moreover, we demonstrate quantum entanglement between these large OAM quanta of one photon and the polarization of its partner photon. To our knowledge, this corresponds to entanglement with the largest quantum number that has been demonstrated in an experiment. The results may also open novel ways to couple single photons to massive objects, enhance angular resolution, and highlight OAM as a promising way to increase the information capacity of a single photon.

Teodor Strömberg

Shengwang Du