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Physical Review A

Second-order Talbot self-imaging effect in the time domain

Hong-Guo Li, Ruixue Zhang, Zhan-Dong Liu, Zong-Guo Li

Published Jul 23, 2019• 6 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Different from classical Talbot self-imaging, second-order spatial Talbot effect is a kind of second-order imaging, in which the self-imaging of an object is observed through intensity correlation measurement. Here, in terms of space-time duality, we investigate the temporal counterpart of second-order Talbot self-imaging with temporally incoherent light. Our work shows that second-order Talbot effect in the time domain is related to the joint dispersion of light pulse in dispersive medium. Particularly, based on the discrete Fourier transformation, the fractional Talbot self-imaging via intensity correlation doesn't generally possess a definite fractional period, which contradicts some articles' results. Our results may be useful for implementing the repetition-rate-multiplication technique and remotely transmitting the periodic temporal signals robustly.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.100.013846

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Different from classical Talbot self-imaging, second-order spatial Talbot effect is a kind of second-order imaging, in which the self-imaging of an object is observed through intensity correlation measurement. Here, in terms of space-time duality, we investigate the temporal counterpart of second-order Talbot self-imaging with temporally incoherent light. Our work shows that second-order Talbot effect in the time domain is related to the joint dispersion of light pulse in dispersive medium. Particularly, based on the discrete Fourier transformation, the fractional Talbot self-imaging via intensity correlation doesn't generally possess a definite fractional period, which contradicts some articles' results. Our results may be useful for implementing the repetition-rate-multiplication technique and remotely transmitting the periodic temporal signals robustly.
Two‐photon “ghost” imaging, based on the second‐order intensity correlation, was first realized with entangled light, but has now been demonstrated with true thermal light. Following our work on lensless and high‐order ghost imaging with thermal light, we have recently shown that both entangled and thermal light may be used to produce two‐photon correlation Talbot effects. In the Talbot effect, first observed in 1836, a periodic object illuminated with coherent light can give rise to repeated self‐images at specific positions within the Fresnel diffraction field without any lens. Using an incoherent thermal light source, we have experimentally observed second and higher order Talbot self‐images, including fractional and phase‐reversal images, at multiples of the Talbot length in a lensless setup containing two optical paths. We have also recently observed another surprising imaging phenomenon which does not depend on the second‐order correlation function, and can produce both negative and positive images of a nonlocal object. It is expected that these types of imaging will find novel applications in both the microscopic and macroscopic regimes.
The second-order Talbot effect is analyzed for a periodic object illuminated by entangled photon pairs in both the quantum imaging and quantum lithography configurations. The Klyshko picture is applied to describe the quantum imaging scheme, in which self-images of the object that may or may not be magnified can be observed nonlocally in the photon coincidences but not in the singles count rate. In the quantum lithography setup, we find that the second-order Talbot length is half that of the classical first-order case, thus the resolution may be improved by a factor of 2.
The Talbot effect -- a near-field diffraction phenomenon in which a periodic wavefront self-images at regular distances -- can be transposed to the time--frequency domain via the space--time duality between diffraction and dispersive broadening. We exploit this analogy to define the time--frequency (TF) Talbot effect and show that it implements different Clifford operations on TF Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (TF-GKP) qubits (Phys. Rev. 102, 012607), a class of qubit states encoded in the discretised frequency and time-of-arrival degrees of freedom of entangled photon pairs, whose logical basis corresponds to even and odd components of an entangled frequency combs. These states are intrinsically robust against small frequency and temporal displacements, which can be further corrected by linear or nonlinear quantum error-correction schemes. We analyse the role of the comb envelope and peak width relative to the free spectral range, and show that a compromise must be made between the gate fidelity of the Clifford gates induced by TF-Talbot operation and the error-correction capacity of the code. We then demonstrate that the signature of the TF-Talbot effect is directly accessible via the generalised Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometer: all six logical GKP states can be unambiguously distinguished by introducing a frequency shift of half the comb periodicity in one interferometer arm. We conclude with a feasibility analysis based on current experimental technology, identifying the comb finesse as the key figure of merit for both gate performance and correctability. This conclusion extends naturally to quadrature GKP states, where a shear in quadrature phase space is precisely a Talbot effect.
We report the first experimental observation of quantum Talbot effects with single photons and entangled photon pairs. Both the first- and second-order quantum Talbot self-images are observed experimentally. They exhibit unique properties, which are different from those produced by coherent and incoherent classical light sources. In particular, our experiments show that the revival distance of two-photon Talbot imaging is twice the usual classical Talbot length and there is no net improvement in the resolution, due to the near-field effect of Fresnel diffraction, which is different from the case of previous proof-of-principle quantum lithography experiments in the far field.
We analyze and experimentally demonstrate a new (temporal) Talbot effect, where a pulsed phase grating is applied to a cloud of cold atoms (Bose-Einstein condensate). In contrast to the usual (spatial) Talbot effect, our atoms gain kinetic energy when diffracted by the pulsed grating. The energy gain and the matter-wave-dispersion relation result in an exact (no paraxial approximation) Talbot effect where the initial wave front is reconstructed at multiples of a ``Talbot time'' TT{T}_{\mathrm{T}}TT​. We demonstrate the Talbot effect by applying a second pulsed phase grating after a variable delay. When this second grating is applied at even (odd) multiples of TT/2{T}_{\mathrm{T}}/2TT​/2, it doubles (cancels) the effect of the first pulsed grating.