Phase-quadrature quantum imaging with undetected photons

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel polarization-optics-based phase-quadrature method in nonlinear interferometry for imaging with undetected photons, enabling simultaneous phase and visibility measurement in a single shot, suitable for dynamic process detection.

Contribution

The authors develop a new phase-quadrature implementation that simplifies data acquisition in nonlinear interferometry with undetected photons, eliminating the need for phase variation.

Findings

Successful imaging of static phase masks opaque to detected photons

Real-time monitoring of dynamic processes like film drying and tape stretching

Single-image acquisition of phase and visibility without phase variation

Abstract

Sensing with undetected photons allows access to spectral regions with simultaneous detection of photons of another region and is based on nonlinear interferometry. To obtain the full information of a sample, the corresponding interferogram has to be analyzed in terms of amplitude and phase, which has been realized so far by multiple measurements followed by phase variation. Here, we present a polarization-optics-based phase-quadrature implementation in a nonlinear interferometer for imaging with undetected photons in the infrared region. This allows us to obtain phase and visibility with a single image acquisition without the need of varying optical paths or phases, thus enabling the detection of dynamic processes. We demonstrate the usefullness of our method on a static phase mask opaque to the detected photons as well as on dynamic measurement tasks as the drying of an isopropanol film and the stretching of an adhesive tape.