Polarization entanglement-enabled quantum holography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum holography method that uses entangled photon pairs to image complex objects without classical coherence, enabling imaging through noise and disorder, and also quantifies hyper-entanglement across many modes.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantum holography technique leveraging polarization-entangled photons to perform imaging without classical coherence, and demonstrates hyper-entanglement quantification over thousands of modes.

Findings

Successfully reconstructed phase images through noise and disorder.

Enhanced spatial resolution compared to classical holography.

Quantified hyper-entanglement across 10^4 modes.

Abstract

Holography is a cornerstone characterisation and imaging technique that can be applied to the full electromagnetic spectrum, from X-rays to radio waves or even particles such as neutrons. The key property in all these holographic approaches is coherence that is required to extract the phase information through interference with a reference beam - without this, holography is not possible. Here we introduce a holographic imaging approach that operates on intrinsically incoherent and unpolarised beams, so that no phase information can be extracted from a classical interference measurement. Instead, the holographic information is encoded in the second order coherence of entangled states of light. Using spatial-polarisation hyper-entangled photons pairs, we remotely reconstruct phase images of complex objects. Information is encoded into the polarisation degree of the entangled state, allowing us to image through dynamic phase disorder and even in the presence of strong classical noise, with enhanced spatial resolution compared to classical coherent holographic systems. Beyond imaging, quantum holography quantifies hyper-entanglement distributed over 10^4 modes via a spatially-resolved Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality measurement, with applications in quantum state characterisation.