Superresolving Imaging of Irregular Arrays of Thermal Light Sources using Multiphoton Interferences

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method using multiphoton interference and linear detection to achieve high-resolution imaging of arbitrary thermal light source arrangements in one dimension, surpassing classical limits.

Contribution

It generalizes previous work to reconstruct any number of independent thermal sources at arbitrary separations using higher-order intensity correlations.

Findings

Experimental validation of the imaging protocol.

Mathematical proof of subclassical resolution.

Extension to arbitrary source configurations.

Abstract

We propose to use multiphoton interferences of photons emitted from statistically independent thermal light sources in combination with linear optical detection techniques to reconstruct, i.e., image, arbitrary source geometries in one dimension with subclassical resolution. The scheme is an extension of earlier work [Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 233603 (2012)] where N regularly spaced sources in one dimension were imaged by use of the Nth-order intensity correlation function. Here, we generalize the scheme to reconstruct any number of independent thermal light sources at arbitrary separations in one dimension exploiting intensity correlation functions of order $m \geq 3$. We present experimental results confirming the imaging protocol and provide a rigorous mathematical proof for the obtained subclassical resolution.