Single photon interferometry and quantum astrophysics

Raphael Abrahão, Paul Stankus, ANDREI NOMEROTSKI +12 more

The idea of exploiting quantum features of light to perform more precise astrophysical measurements is a long-desired goal of both the optics and astrophysics communities, but only recently have theoretical proposals started to be experimentally implemented. One important goal is to increase the baseline distance between telescopes in interferometry, and thus improve the angular resolution of the celestial object. Some of the earlier proposals rely on the use of quantum repeaters to connect the two baseline stations. However, another proposal employs other quantum optical approaches to circumvent the need for quantum repeaters, while still providing a quantum advantage. I will discuss the on-going project for building quantum-enhanced telescopes for precision astrometry, i.e., measurements of position and velocity of celestial objects. I will present a proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of a two-photon interferometer for such goal. Moreover, I will present a single-photon-sensitive spectrometer, based on a linear array of 512 single-photon avalanche diode detectors, with 0.04 nm spectral and 40 ps temporal resolutions. This device enables us to implement a spectral binning technique, essentially allowing us to perform multiple measurements together, because each frequency can be treated as an independent measurement. Such device could also be used in other applications. Lastly, I will report on our frequency-resolved Hanbury Brown-Twiss experiments. Our work represents an important step towards quantum telescopes.

Gregg S. Jaeger, Alexander V. Sergienko

Sun Kyung Lee, Noh Soo Han, Tai Hyun Yoon +1 more

We demonstrate a frequency-comb single-photon interferometry for quantum spectroscopy and imaging with undetected photons by utilizing both of optical frequency comb technique and quantum erasing mechanism with path-entangled photon pairs.

Dirk Bouwmeester

Andrei V. Sergeev, Vladimir Mitin, Boris S. Karasik +1 more

Novel approaches to THz sensing based superconductor detectors and emerging superconducting nanomaterials have a strong potential to boost development of advanced optoelectronic devices, such as THz detectors, THz mixers, single photon counters and quantum calorimeters with outstanding sensitivity. Such devices have a number of applications in THZ environmental and industrial monitoring, astrophysics, homeland security, and medicine. Single photon counters have potential as key elements for optical communication and networking, quantum imaging and metrology, quantum optical computing and bio-photonics, and single-molecule spectroscopy.

Yawen Tang, Wei Ye, Lu Qin +6 more

Astronomical interferometry is a cornerstone technique for high-resolution stellar imaging and observational astrophysics, extracting spatial information from the coherence of light collected by separated telescopes. Since the degree of coherence is complex, a genuine imaging task requires the joint recovery of the modulus and the relative phase, instead of independent singleparameter estimations. We investigate the simultaneous estimation of both parameters based on direct interferometry scheme and continuou-svariable quantum teleportation scheme. We find that in simultaneous estimation the direct interferometry scheme consistently yields a lower quantum Cramér-Rao bound, demonstrating its superiority over the continuous-variable quantum teleportation scheme. Furthermore, we establish the conditions under which the classical Cramér-Rao bound for Gaussian measurements saturates the quantum Cramér-Rao bound, identifying heterodyne detection as a near-optimal measurement scheme in the large mean photon number regime. An analysis of transmission loss reveals that the direct interferometry scheme yields superior precision in the short-baseline regime, whereas the continuous-variable quantum teleportation scheme outperforms it at longer baselines.