Experimental Observation of Quantum Holographic Imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents the first experimental demonstration of quantum holographic imaging using entangled photons, showing nonlocal measurement of amplitude and phase through two-photon correlations, and analyzing different detection regimes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel quantum holography scheme with entangled photons and compares it to classical holography methods, demonstrating equivalence in the point detection regime.

Findings

Quantum holography with entangled photons is experimentally demonstrated.

Two-photon correlation measurement forms holographic images despite incoherence.

Different detection regimes correspond to classical holography types.

Abstract

We report the first experimental observation of quantum holographic imaging with entangled photon pairs, generated in a spontaneous parametric down-conversion process. The signal photons play both roles of "object wave" and "reference wave" in holography but are recorded by a point detector providing only encoding information, while the idler photons travel freely and are locally manipulated with spatial resolution. The holographic image is formed by the two-photon correlation measurement, although both the signal and idler beams are incoherent. According to the detection regime of the signal photons, we analyze three types of quantum holography schemes: point detection, coherent detection and bucket detection, which can correspond to classical holography using a point source, a plane-wave coherent source and a spatially incoherent source, respectively. Our experiment demonstrates that the two-photon holography in the point detection regime is equivalent to the one-photon holography using a point source. Physically, the quantum holography experiment verifies that a pair of non-commutable physical quantities, the amplitude and phase components of the field operator, can be nonlocally measured through two-photon entanglement.