Rostock 2019 – scientific programme

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SYQM: Symposium Novel Perspectives in Quantum Metrology

SYQM 1: Symposium: Novel Perspectives in Quantum Technologies

SYQM 1.1: Invited Talk

Friday, March 15, 2019, 10:30–11:00, U Audimax

Quantum metrology for subdiffraction incoherent optical imaging — •Mankei Tsang — National University of Singapore

Two traumas await starlight at a telescope: the aperture amputates its high spatial frequencies, while the detector measures its energy in rough quanta. The image, as a result, looks blurry and noisy, and the information obtainable from the light must be limited. As these problems arise from the wave-particle duality of light, a quantum treatment is appropriate. The theoretical tools of quantum metrology, in particular, can reveal the ultimate amount of information in the photons regardless of the measurement, thereby establishing a definitive solution to the age-old resolution problem. Using quantum metrology, we recently found that, surprisingly, there is a lot more information in starlight than previously realized. Our results imply that parameters such as the separation between two sub-Rayleigh sources or the moments of a subdiffraction object can be estimated much more accurately than direct imaging can fundamentally do. Furthermore, we have discovered a measurement called spatial-mode demultiplexing (SPADE) that can extract the neglected information and estimate the parameters with accuracies close to the quantum limits. 9 experimental demonstrations have since been reported. Realizable with far-field linear optics and photon counting, SPADE is envisioned to benefit not only observational astronomy but also fluorescence microscopy.