Quantum imaging harnesses quantum properties of light and their interaction with the environment to go beyond the limits of classical imaging or to implement unique imaging modalities. In conventional quantum imaging systems, a non-classical state of light illuminates an object from which an image is formed on a set of photodetectors. In this respect, sources of entangled photon pairs are very prolific. Over the last decades, they have been used to achieve super-resolution [1] and sub-shot-noise imaging [2], as well as to develop new imaging approaches such as ghost imaging [3], quantum illumination [4] and quantum holography [5].
However, most of these experimental schemes require to measure intensity correlations between many spatial positions in parallel, a task that is much more delicate than forming an image by photon accumulation. Originally, this was performed using raster-scanning single-pixel single-photon detectors, but this process is very photon inefficient and time-consuming. In recent years, these systems were substituted by single-photon sensitive cameras, such as electron multiplied charge coupled device (EMCCD), to achieve faster quantum imaging with photon pairs and move this field closer to practical applications [6,7].
In this presentation, I will detail the technique that we have developed to image entangled photon pairs using cameras. I will then describe some specific approaches that were implemented thanks to this novel imaging ability, including quantum image distillation [4] and entanglement-enabled quantum holography [5]. Finally, I will discuss the perspectives and general interest of developing quantum imaging system based on entangled photon pairs.
Dr.Hugo Defienne is a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, where he is leading the ‘Quantum Imaging Little Team’ (www.thequilteam.com). He is an expert in the fields of quantum optics, optical imaging and complex optical media. His research aims to harness quantum properties of light to develop new imaging applications.
Hugo Defienne started his career by a PhD in the Kastler-Brossel laboratory in France (2012-2015) during which he pioneered the use of quantum optical states in scattering and complex media. He then extended his research scope to quantum imaging as a postdoc at Princeton University in the USA (2016-2018). There, he initiated a new research direction by merging quantum imaging with structured illumination approaches. In 2019, he was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship and took up a post-doctoral researcher post at the University of Glasgow (UK) to develop quantum communication approaches with single-photon sensitive cameras. In the same year, he secured a Lecturer position at the University of Glasgow.
[1] Boto, Agedi N., et al. "Quantum interferometric optical lithography: exploiting entanglement to beat the diffraction limit." Physical Review Letters 85.13 (2000): 2733.
[2] Brida, Giorgio, Marco Genovese, and I. Ruo Berchera. "Experimental realization of sub-shot-noise quantum imaging." Nature Photonics 4.4 (2010): 227-230.
[3] Pittman, Todd B., et al. "Optical imaging by means of two-photon quantum entanglement." Physical Review A 52.5 (1995): R3429.
[4] Defienne, Hugo, et al. "Quantum image distillation." Science advances 5.10 (2019): eaax0307.
[5] Defienne, Hugo, et al. "Polarization entanglement-enabled quantum holography." Nature Physics 17, 591-597 (2021).
[6] Moreau, Paul-Antoine, et al. "Realization of the purely spatial Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox in full-field images of spontaneous parametric down-conversion." Physical Review A 86.1 (2012): 010101.
[7] Edgar, Matthew P., et al. "Imaging high-dimensional spatial entanglement with a camera." Nature communications 3.1 (2012): 1-6.
Figure: " Separating quantum from classical images Defienne, H., Reichert, M., Fleischer, J. W., & Faccio, D. (2019). Quantum image distillation. Science advances, 5(10), eaax0307."