Abstract Holography provides an effective solution for retrieving the complex optical field, laying the foundation of precision measurement ranging from biological imaging to material analysis. However, conventional holography relies on splitting photon paths by a bulky interferometer to locally modulate the interference field, yielding only the wrapped phase. To overcome this, a quantum differential holography (QDH) is proposed, which employs a metasurface-integrated optical differentiator to achieve nonlocal polarization interference within a single signal photon path. The phase information is optically encoded as derivatives within the measured intensity, eliminating the fragile arctangent-based phase unwrapping step that plagues low-visibility fringe reconstruction. Furthermore, interference is remotely modulated by selecting the basis of an idler photon whose polarization is entangled with the spatiotemporal field of signal photon. The QDH provides a compact and stable quantum holographic platform, which unlocks additional possibilities for biomedicine, materials science, and quantum information processing.
Abstract Holography provides an effective solution for retrieving the complex optical field, laying the foundation of precision measurement ranging from biological imaging to material analysis. However, conventional holography relies on splitting photon paths by a bulky interferometer to locally modulate the interference field, yielding only the wrapped phase. To overcome this, a quantum differential holography (QDH) is proposed, which employs a metasurface-integrated optical differentiator to achieve nonlocal polarization interference within a single signal photon path. The phase information is optically encoded as derivatives within the measured intensity, eliminating the fragile arctangent-based phase unwrapping step that plagues low-visibility fringe reconstruction. Furthermore, interference is remotely modulated by selecting the basis of an idler photon whose polarization is entangled with the spatiotemporal field of signal photon. The QDH provides a compact and stable quantum holographic platform, which unlocks additional possibilities for biomedicine, materials science, and quantum information processing.
Holography provides comprehensive characterization of complex light fields, laying the foundation for biological microscopy and precision measurement. Although the amplitude and phase information can be quantitatively analyzed through phase-shifting holography, the additional beam deflection during multistep phase-shifting operations and the shot noise will inevitably reduce the accuracy of holography. Here, a quantum nonlocal holography via multichannel metasurfaces (QNHM) is proposed to achieve high-quality holography under high noise levels. By integrating multiple quantum channels on the metasurface, the projection probabilities of idler photons in four polarization bases are simultaneously measured. Since the spatiotemporal field of signal photons are nonlocally modulated by the polarization of idler photons, the phase-shifting operations is completely avoided. The coincidence measurement greatly filters out the shot noise from the time domain, thereby enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio, image contrast, and accuracy. The proposed QNHM may open up feasible avenues in biomedicine, material analysis, and quantum information processing.
Holography encodes information using classical light interference with applications ranging from microscopy to data storage. Quantum entanglement enables information processing with capabilities beyond technology based on classical principles. Here we introduce a holographic imaging concept that is conditioned on the coherence, and thus the entanglement, between the qubit terms in a quantum entangled photon state. By harnessing the nonlocal properties of entanglement, we remotely reconstruct an image encoded in the phase of spatial-polarisation hyper-entangled photons. The nonlocal nature of our measurements removes the need for path overlap, resulting in insensitivity to mechanical instabilities, while polarisation encoding provides robustness against random phase disorder. Furthermore, the measurement of correlations removes the sensitivity to the presence of stray light.
This study investigates quantum holography, emphasizing its capability to conduct holographic imaging without the requirement for first-order coherence—a limitation of classical physics. By harnessing quantum entanglement, where image data is embedded in the phase correlation of polarization-entangled photon pairs and spread across the transverse spatial dimension, quantum holography enhances imaging performance. This technique not only improves resolution for polarization-sensitive phase objects but also provides resilience against stochastic phase fluctuations and uncontrolled ambient light, offering significant tangible benefits compared to conventional holography. Additionally, its integration with quantum tomography enables precise analysis of multi-dimensional hyper-entangled states, advancing quantum state analysis. Although current challenges remain, such as extended acquisition times due to technological constraints, ongoing advancements in faster, more affordable sensors are expected to address these issues. As a result, quantum holography is poised to have broad applications in biological imaging, sensing, and the exploration of complex high-dimensional quantum states. These developments position quantum holography as a crucial technology in the future of quantum optical communication and information processing, driving innovation and opening new avenues in these fields.
Metasurfaces, with their capability to control all possible dimensions of light, have become integral to quantum optical applications, including quantum state generation, operation, and tomography. We utilize a metasurface to generate polarization–hologram hybrid entanglement between a signal–idler photon pair to construct a quantum hologram. The properties of the quantum hologram can be revealed by collapsing the polarization degree of freedom of the idler photon, inducing interference between two holographic states of the signal photon as a meaningful and selective erasure of the holographic content. On the contrary, interference disappears when the idler photon is detected without observing polarization. This process can be further interpreted as a quantum holographic eraser, where the erasing action is visualized with erased contents in holograms. Our construction of a polarization–hologram hybrid entangled state with metasurfaces will be useful for quantum communication with enhanced robustness, anticounterfeiting applications through the additional quantum degrees of freedom or phase difference between two holographic states, and as an emerging platform for exploring fundamental quantum concepts for entanglement and nonlocality.
Metasurfaces can precisely manipulate the amplitude, phase, and polarization of incident light through subwavelength structures, greatly advancing the quantum meta-holographic imaging. However, the current methods of using quantum holography only control either the amplitude or the phase on the imaging plane, so the resulted scalar holography without the polarization distribution has limited imaging channels. Here, the vectorial meta-holography using entangled signal-idler photon pairs is experimentally demonstrated to realize remotely controlled multi-channel quantum imaging. By simultaneous control of the amplitude ratio between two cross-polarization holographic images and their phase difference on the image plane, the polarization distribution accordingly changes with the incident polarization state. The accurate correspondence ensures the correct reconstruction of 32 incident polarization states with an average fidelity up to 94.78%. This enables entangled idler photons to remotely control the holographic images reconstructed by the entangled signal photons, where the signal-to-noise ratio is as high as 10.78 dB, even for maximally mixed quantum states. This vectorial meta-holography using entangled states has a larger polarization state information capacity and will facilitate miniaturized quantum imaging and efficient quantum state tomography.
Phase reconstruction plays a pivotal role in biology, medical imaging, and wavefront sensing. However, multiple measurements and adjustments are usually required for conventional schemes, which inevitably reduces the quality of phase imaging. Here, based on multi-channel metasurface and quantum entanglement source, a simple and integrated quantum analog operation system is proposed to realize quantitative phase reconstruction with a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) under a low signal photon level. Without additional measurements and adjustments, four differential images necessary for the phase reconstruction are captured simultaneously. The non-local correlation of entangled photon pairs enables to remotely manipulate working modes of the system. Besides, the consistency of entangled photon pairs in time domain makes it possible to achieve a high SNR imaging by trigger detection. The results may potentially empower the application of metasurfaces in optical chip, wave function reconstruction, and label-free biology imaging.