Imaging with Zero Photons

Graham P. Collins

Meixue Chen, Yiqi Song, Yu Gu +8 more

Ghost imaging was first demonstrated with entangled photon pairs and well-known for its peculiar properties. The signal beam that illuminates the object possesses no spatial resolution, whereas the reference beam, which never interacts with the object, is spatially resolved. Either beam alone cannot retrieve the image, which can only be obtained when the signal and reference beams are correlated. Here we will report a ghost imaging experiment with even more peculiar properties, in which the image can be reconstructed when no photon interacts with the object or even no photon in neither signal nor reference beam. All the photons interacted with the object are discarded. Only the time bins with zero photon are employed to retrieve the image, a process referred to as "ghost imaging with zero photons" hereafter. The reason why ghost image can be retrieved with zero photons is jointly determined by photon-number projection measurement and photon statistics of thermal light. The results are helpful to resolve the debate on the physics of ghost imaging and understand the relation between quantum and classical correlations.

Aviad Schori, Dmitri Borodin, Kenji Tamasaku +1 more

We observed of ghost imaging with parametrically down-converted x-ray photons pairs. We reconstructed the image of slits with nominally zero background levels. Our procedure can lead to the observation of quantum phenomena at x-ray wavelengths.

M. Bertolotti

Aviad Schori, Dmitri Borodin, Kenji Tamasaku +1 more

We report the experimental observation of ghost imaging with paired x-ray photons, which are generated by parametric downconversion. We use the one-to-one relation between the photon energies and the emission angles and the anticorrelation between the $k$-vectors of the signal and the idler photons to reconstruct the images of slits with nominally zero background levels. Further extension of our procedure can be used for the observation of various quantum phenomena at x-ray wavelengths.

Wilhelm G. Kaenders, Frank Lison, A. Richter +2 more