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arXiv:quant-ph/0503122 · Optics Letters

Correlated two-photon imaging with true thermal light

Da Zhang, Yanhua Zhai, Ling-An Wu, Xi-Hao Chen

Published Sep 15, 2005• 378 citations
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Abstract

Received March 14, 2005; revised manuscript received May 4, 2005; accepted May 4, 2005 We report what is believed to be the first experimental demonstration of two-photon correlated imaging with true thermal light from a hollow cathode lamp. The coherence time of the source is much shorter than that of previous experiments using random scattered light from a laser. A two-pinhole mask was used as object, and the corresponding thin lens equation was well satisfied. Since thermal light sources are easier to obtain and measure than entangled light, it is conceivable that they may be used in special imaging applications.

DOI
10.1364/ol.30.002354

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Received March 14, 2005; revised manuscript received May 4, 2005; accepted May 4, 2005 We report what is believed to be the first experimental demonstration of two-photon correlated imaging with true thermal light from a hollow cathode lamp. The coherence time of the source is much shorter than that of previous experiments using random scattered light from a laser. A two-pinhole mask was used as object, and the corresponding thin lens equation was well satisfied. Since thermal light sources are easier to obtain and measure than entangled light, it is conceivable that they may be used in special imaging applications.
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.
Distinct from previous principle-demonstrations, this practical quantum ghost imaging experiment presents the first set of two-photon images captured by a photon counting CCD camera by means of jointly counting 'reflected' photons from the object. In fact, the CCD camera was not 'looking' at the object at all. Rather, the CCD camera was facing the chaotic light source. The output of the CCD camera was used for coincidence registration of the two-photon joint-detection events with another photon counting detector which simply collects all randomly reflected photons from the surface of the object. It is also interesting to find that the observed two-photon images are 'distortion-free', i.e., any disturbances made along the light path has no effect on the quality of the image. These experimental observations are not only useful for practical field-applications, but also important from fundamental point of view. The experiment evidences a rejection of the 'projection shadow' idea in a non-deniable way and further explores the two-photon interference nature of thermal light ghost imaging.
We show an experimental study of two-photon imaging using thermal light sources. It is interesting to see that the thermal source behaves like a mirror producing an equal size reproduction of a chosen object. We refer to such mirror as "magic" because the ghost image produced by the mirror is real in the sense that it lies in the real space and can be further imaged by a camera or an equivalent optical system. We also show that it is possible to overcome the main limitation towards the actual implementation of thermal light two-photon imaging, i.e. the poor contrast of the imaging pattern, by designing an appropriate correlation measurement scheme that is insensitive to the uncorrelated background noise.