Experimental realization of scanning quantum microscopy

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel scanning quantum microscopy technique using photon pair correlations, achieving high resolution and potential for biological and molecular imaging applications.

Contribution

It introduces a fast, single-mode quantum imaging method with scanning capabilities, advancing quantum microscopy towards practical bio-physical and molecular applications.

Findings

Successful imaging of onion epithelial cells

Resolution estimation on a metal grating

Potential extension to mid-infrared applications

Abstract

Quantum imaging is an ever expanding research field, in which the aim is to exploit the quantum nature of light to enhance image reconstruction capabilities. Despite a number of successful demonstrations for quantum imaging, quantum microscopy still seems out of the range for practical applications, due to different physical and technical reasons. Here we propose an imaging method exploiting the quantum correlations of photon pairs and a scanning microscope to achieve fast, single mode quantum imaging. We first test our technique on a metal grating to estimate the resolution capabilities of our system. Moreover, we asses its potential in terms of the number of available independent pixels at full resolution compared to different quantum imaging approaches. Finally, we demonstrate scanning quantum microscopy of onion epithelial cells, paving the way towards scalable quantum microscopy for bio-physical applications. Our results, combined with the rapidly evolving photon-pair generation and detection technology towards the mid-infrared, could lead to an extension of quantum microscopy applications towards the mid-infrared, to access the molecular fingerprint region.