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Physical Review A

Ghost imaging with paired x-ray photons

Aviad Schori, Dmitri Borodin, Kenji Tamasaku, S. Shwartz

Published Jun 4, 2018• 56 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We report the experimental observation of ghost imaging with paired x-ray photons, which are generated by parametric downconversion. We use the one-to-one relation between the photon energies and the emission angles and the anticorrelation between the $k$-vectors of the signal and the idler photons to reconstruct the images of slits with nominally zero background levels. Further extension of our procedure can be used for the observation of various quantum phenomena at x-ray wavelengths.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.97.063804

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We report the experimental observation of ghost imaging with paired x-ray photons, which are generated by parametric downconversion. We use the one-to-one relation between the photon energies and the emission angles and the anticorrelation between the kkk-vectors of the signal and the idler photons to reconstruct the images of slits with nominally zero background levels. Further extension of our procedure can be used for the observation of various quantum phenomena at x-ray wavelengths.
Abstract. The field of Quantum Imaging exploits the quantum nature of light and the intrinsic parallelism of optical signals to devise novel techniques for optical imaging and for parallel information processing at the quantum level (see [1] and references quoted therein). In this presentation, we will shortly discuss two topics in this area: the first is the so-called ghost imaging which, however, is not necessarily quantum; the second is the detection of faint amplitude objects with a sensitivity beyond the standard quantum limit, and in this case we are fully in the quantum domain. Both topics are related to the phenomenon of optical parametric down-conversion (PDC), in which a fraction of the pump photons of a laser beam, injected into a crystal with a quadratic non-linearity, are down-converted to a pair of signal and idler photons, with conservation of total energy and total momentum. A feature of paramount importance is that the signal and idler beams are spatially correlated both in the near field (position correlation) and in the far field (momentum correlation).The simultaneous presence of position and momentum correlation implies quantum entanglement, as it has been also observed experimentally [2]. 1. Ghost Imaging
Ghost imaging was first demonstrated with entangled photon pairs and well-known for its peculiar properties. The signal beam that illuminates the object possesses no spatial resolution, whereas the reference beam, which never interacts with the object, is spatially resolved. Either beam alone cannot retrieve the image, which can only be obtained when the signal and reference beams are correlated. Here we will report a ghost imaging experiment with even more peculiar properties, in which the image can be reconstructed when no photon interacts with the object or even no photon in neither signal nor reference beam. All the photons interacted with the object are discarded. Only the time bins with zero photon are employed to retrieve the image, a process referred to as "ghost imaging with zero photons" hereafter. The reason why ghost image can be retrieved with zero photons is jointly determined by photon-number projection measurement and photon statistics of thermal light. The results are helpful to resolve the debate on the physics of ghost imaging and understand the relation between quantum and classical correlations.
The reported experiment is a two-photon optical imaging experiment1 in which a spontaneous-parametric-downconversion light beam, which consists of pairs of orthogonally polarized signal and idler photons, is split into two diverging beams by a polarization beam splitter, so that co- incidence detections may be performed between two distant photon-counting detectors. An aperture (mask) placed in front of one of the detectors is illuminated by the signal beam through a convex lens. Surprisingly, an image of this aperture is observed in the coincidence counting rate when the other detector is scanned in the transverse plane of the idler beam, even though both detectors’ single counting rates remain constant.
Ghost imaging can be performed using either quantum or classical states of light that possess strong spatial correlations. In both cases, the image is formed by averaging over many optical events. Here we show that it is possible to distinguish an object from a preestablished basis set of objects by using a small number of position-correlated photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion. The signal photon is incident on one member of a set of spatially nonoverlapping objects. The "ghost" image information is impressed upon the spatially separated idler photon and is extracted by means of holographic filtering and coincidence detection. We were able to distinguish among sets of two and four spatially nonoverlapping objects with confidence levels higher than 87% and 81%, respectively. This method of ghost imaging can be performed in situations requiring extremely low light levels.
One of the most surprising consequences of quantum mechanics is the nonlocal multi-particle interference observable in joint-detection of distant particle-detectors. Ghost imaging is one of such phenomena. Two types of ghost imaging have been experimentally demonstrated since 1995. Type-one ghost imaging uses entangled photon pairs as the light source. The nonlocal point-to-point image-forming correlation is the result of a constructive-destructive superposition among a large number of biphoton amplitudes, a nonclassical entity corresponding to different yet indistinguishable alternative ways of producing a joint-detction event between distant photodetectors. Type-two ghost imaging uses chaotic-thermal light. The type-two image-forming correlation is the result of interferences between paired two-photon amplitudes, corresponding to two different yet indistinguishable alternative ways of triggering a join-detection event by two independent photons. A great deal of confusion about ghost imaging comes from "ghost shadow". Similar to x-ray photography, a ghost shadow can be made in coincidences by "blocking-partial blocking-unblocking" of either co-rotating laser beams or classically correlated "speckles". "Ghost shadow" is indeed a classical phenomenon. The physics of ghost imaging, however, is fundamentally different. This article is aimed at exploring the nonlocal two-photon interference nature of ghost imaging.