Numerical Optical Centroid Measurements

TL;DR

Optical centroid measurements (OCM) offer a practical way to surpass the diffraction limit in optical imaging by using single-photon detectors, with numerical analysis confirming their effectiveness beyond analytical approximations.

Contribution

This work numerically investigates OCM, demonstrating its advantages over traditional methods and exploring various input states and detection strategies.

Findings

OCM can surpass the diffraction limit in optical resolution.

Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of OCM beyond analytical models.

Different detection strategies and input states influence OCM performance.

Abstract

Optical imaging methods are typically restricted to a resolution of order of the probing light wavelength $\lambda_p$ by the Rayleigh diffraction limit. This limit can be circumvented by making use of multiphoton detection of correlated $N$-photon states, having an effective wavelength $\lambda_p/N$. But the required $N$-photon detection usually renders these schemes impractical. To overcome this limitation, recently, so-called optical centroid measurements (OCM) have been proposed which replace the multi-photon detectors by an array of single-photon detectors. Complementary to the existing approximate analytical results, we explore the approach using numerical experiments by sampling and analyzing detection events from the initial state wave function. This allows us to quantitatively study the approach also beyond the constraints set by the approximate analytical treatment, to compare different detection strategies, and to analyze other classes of input states.