Quantum-inspired protocol for measuring the degree of similarity between spatial shapes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum-inspired optical protocol that efficiently measures the similarity between spatial shapes in beams by assessing polarization, avoiding complex amplitude and phase measurements.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantum-inspired method that uses polarization measurements of non-separable beams to determine shape similarity without direct amplitude or phase analysis.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated experimentally

Reduces complexity of shape similarity measurement

Utilizes non-separable optical beams for enhanced measurement

Abstract

We put forward and demonstrate experimentally a {\it quantum-inspired} protocol that allows to quantify the degree of similarity between two spatial shapes embedded in two optical beams without the need to measure the amplitude and phase across each beam. Instead the sought-after information can be retrieved measuring the degree of polarization of the combined optical beam, a measurement that is much easier to implement experimentally. The protocol makes use of non-separable optical beams, whose main trait is that different degrees of freedom (polarization and spatial shape here) can not be described independently.