Efficient imaging of quantum emitters using compressive sensing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compressive sensing imaging method for quantum emitters that significantly reduces measurement time and data while maintaining high-fidelity spatial and correlation function reconstructions.

Contribution

The authors develop and experimentally validate a compressive sensing approach using structured wide-field excitation and random binary patterns for efficient quantum emitter imaging.

Findings

Achieved high-fidelity imaging with only 20% of the measurements needed for raster scanning.

Successfully reconstructed spatial maps of the second-order correlation function g^{(2)}(0).

Enabled identification of single-photon emitters via antibunching signatures with reduced data.

Abstract

Optical imaging of quantum emitters is essential for a wide range of quantum applications. Conventional confocal imaging relies on point-by-point raster scanning, which is inherently time-consuming and photon-inefficient, particularly for sparse emitter distributions and photon-limited samples. Here, we demonstrate a compressive sensing-based imaging approach, where spatially structured wide-field excitation replaces raster scanning, enabling reconstruction of sparse emitters. In our implementation, random binary patterns are used to acquire compressive measurements, from which the spatial fluorescence distribution is reconstructed using a GPSR-BB algorithm. We experimentally demonstrate this approach using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond as a representative platform, with high-fidelity image reconstruction achieved using only approximately $20\%$ of the measurements required for conventional raster scanning. In addition to intensity reconstruction, we extend this framework to reconstruct spatial maps of the second-order correlation function $g^{(2)}(0)$ from compressive measurements. This enables identification of single-photon emitters through antibunching signatures using significantly reduced data.