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Physics World

Entanglement beats diffraction limit

Published Jun 1, 2004• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Physicists in Canada and Austria have succeeded in entangling more than two photons for the first time. Aephraim Steinberg and co-workers at the University of Toronto have entangled three photons, while Anton Zeilinger and colleagues at the University of Vienna have created a four-photon entangled state. The wavelengths of these entangled states are three and four times shorter than the original wavelengths of the photons, which means they could be used to overcome the so-called diffraction limit. Entangled photons could therefore improve the resolution of applications such as lithography and microscopy (Nature 429 161 and 158).

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/17/6/2

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Physicists in Canada and Austria have succeeded in entangling more than two photons for the first time. Aephraim Steinberg and co-workers at the University of Toronto have entangled three photons, while Anton Zeilinger and colleagues at the University of Vienna have created a four-photon entangled state. The wavelengths of these entangled states are three and four times shorter than the original wavelengths of the photons, which means they could be used to overcome the so-called diffraction limit. Entangled photons could therefore improve the resolution of applications such as lithography and microscopy (Nature 429 161 and 158).
Entanglement is an essential phenomenon of quantum mechanics. Two entangled particles, photons for example, will individually yield random results upon being measured, but these results will always be perfectly correlated, no matter how far the two particles are separated from each other. Entanglement has been proven to be at the heart of a wide range of fundamental quantum effects and it drives exciting practical applications, such as quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation and quantum computing [1], which would be impossible in a world limited to classical physics. A team of researchers from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Vienna and the University of Vienna, led by Anton Zeilinger, has now reported the successful transmission of entangled photon pairs between two Canary Islands, bridging a distance of 144 km and a two-photon attenuation of almost ten million to one. The result, published in Nature Physics [2], is so far the most convincing demonstration to perform experiments with entangled photons in space.
The resolution of optical scanning microscopes is limited by the spot size of the scanning beam. It has been proposed by Boto1 et al. and Nasr2 et al. that momentum entangled photons can be focused more tightly than classical light. Thus they should enable one to break the di ractive resolution limit. We report experiments measuring the spatial distribution of strong focussed momentum entangled photon pairs at a center wavelength of 812 nm from a spontaneous parametric down conversion source. Using a single gold stripe deposited on a glass surface as test object we observe a two-photon spot size as small as 194 nm, thereby beating the di raction limit even for conventional two-photon microscopy.
Classical optical lithography is diffraction limited to writing features of a size lambda/2 or greater, where lambda is the optical wavelength. Using nonclassical photon-number states, entangled N at a time, we show that it is possible to write features of minimum size lambda/(2N) in an N-photon absorbing substrate. This result allows one to write a factor of N2 more elements on a semiconductor chip. A factor of N = 2 can be achieved easily with entangled photon pairs generated from optical parametric down-conversion. It is shown how to write arbitrary 2D patterns by using this method.