Hologram of a Single Photon

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel quantum holography method to accurately retrieve the spatial wavefunction of a single photon using quantum interference, advancing quantum information processing capabilities.

Contribution

The paper presents a new technique for recording holograms of single photons by exploiting quantum interference, overcoming limitations of classical holography methods.

Findings

Successfully recorded a hologram of a single photon

Retrieved the full quantum wavefunction of the photon

Demonstrated the method's potential for quantum information applications

Abstract

The spatial structure of single photons is becoming an extensively explored resource used for facilitating the free-space quantum key distribution and quantum computation as well as for benchmarking the limits of quantum entanglement generation with orbital angular momentum modes or reduction of the photon free-space propagation speed. Albeit nowadays an accurate tailoring of photon's spatial structure is routinely performed using methods employed for shaping classical optical beams, the reciprocal problem of retrieving the spatial phase-amplitude structure of an unknown single photon cannot be solved using complimentary classical holography techniques exhibiting excellent interferometric precision. Here we introduce a method to record a hologram of a single photon (HSP) probed by another reference photon, based on essentially different concept of quantum interference between two-photon probability amplitudes. Similarly to classical holograms, HSP encodes full information about photon's "shape", i.e. its quantum wavefunction whose local amplitude and phase are retrieved in the demonstrated experiment.