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Quantum Communications and Quantum Imaging

Temporal imaging and super-resolved spectroscopy with a quantum memory

Michal P. Parniak, Mateusz Mazelanik, Adam Leszczyński, Michał Lipka, Konrad Banaszek, Wojciech Wasilewski

Published Jul 30, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The concept of temporal imaging draws from the analogy between paraxial propagation of light in space and in dispersive media. So far, temporal imaging has been demonstrated with ultrafast light, corresponding to spectral precision in the THz range. In our quantum memory, we have implemented full spectral and temporal processing capabilities for ultra narrowband photons, which allow us to perform temporal imaging with MHz bandwidth and kHz precision. Implementation of this concept leads to many implications, which give rise to two distinct super-resolved spectroscopy schemes, inspired by recent developments in spatial super-resolved imaging. One scheme takes advantage of elaborate interference in the quantum memory, while the other uses optimized analysis of a homodyne detector traces. Overall, our approach not only brings temporal imaging to the previously untackled regime but also points to a variety of new schemes useful in quantum sensing.

DOI
10.1117/12.2594654

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Existing super-resolution methods of optical imaging hold a solid place as an application in natural sciences, but many new developments allow for beating the diffraction limit in a more subtle way. One of the recently explored strategies to fully exploit information already present in the field is to perform a quantum-inspired tailored measurements. Here we exploit the full spectral information of the optical field in order to beat the Rayleigh limit in spectroscopy. We employ an optical quantum memory with spin-wave storage and an embedded processing capability to implement a time-inversion interferometer for input light, projecting the optical field in the symmetric-antisymmetric mode basis. Our tailored measurement achieves a resolution of 15 kHz and requires 20 times less photons than a corresponding Rayleigh-limited conventional method. We demonstrate the advantage of our technique over both conventional spectroscopy and heterodyne measurements, showing potential for application in distinguishing ultra-narrowband emitters, optical communication channels, or signals transduced from lower-frequency domains.
Plenty of quantum information protocols are enabled by manipulation and detection of photonic spectro-temporal degrees of freedom via light–matter interfaces. While present implementations are well suited for high-bandwidth photon sources such as quantum dots, they lack the high resolution required for intrinsically narrowband light–atom interactions. Here, we demonstrate far-field temporal imaging based on ac-Stark spatial spin-wave phase manipulation in a multimode gradient echo memory. We achieve a spectral resolution of 20 kHz with MHz-level bandwidth and an ultralow noise equivalent to 0.023 photons, enabling operation in the single-quantum regime.
The resolution limits of classical spectroscopy can be surpassed by quantum-inspired methods leveraging the information contained in the phase of the complex electromagnetic field. Their counterpart in spatial imaging has been widely discussed and demonstrated; however, the spectral-domain implementations are few and scarce. We experimentally demonstrate a spectroscopic super-resolution method aimed at broadband light (tens to hundreds of GHz), and based on the spectral-domain analog of image inversion interferometry. In a proof-of-principle experiment, we study the paradigmatic problem of estimating a small separation between two incoherent spectral features of equal brightness, with a small number of photons per coherence time. On the grounds of asymptotic estimation theory, more than a two-fold improvement over the spectral direct imaging is demonstrated in terms of required resources (photons) for a given estimator variance. The setup is based on an actively stabilized Mach–Zehnder-type interferometer with electro-optic time lenses and passive spectral dispersers implementing the inversion. As such, the method promises on-chip integration, good scalability, and further applications, e.g., for mode sorting.