OMQ Seminar: Proof-of-Principle Laboratory Demonstration of Long-Baseline Interferometric Imaging Using Distributed Single-Photons as a Non-local Oscillator

By Matt Brown, University of Oregon, Smith/Raymer group

  • Event Type: Seminar
  • Date and Time: 02/14/2022 3:00 pm - 02/14/2022 4:00 pm
  • Location: Willamette 240D and Zoom

Recent proposals suggest that distributed single photons serving as a ‘non-local oscillator’ can outperform coherent states as a phase reference for long-baseline interferometric imaging of weak sources. Such non-local quantum states distributed between telescopes can, in-principle, surpass the limitations of conventional, visible wavelength, interferometric-based astronomical imaging approaches for very-long baselines such as: signal-to-noise, shot noise, signal loss, and faintness of the imaged objects. Here we demonstrate in a table-top experiment, interference between a non-local oscillator generated by equal-path splitting of an idler photon from a pulsed, separable, parametric down conversion process and a spectrally single-mode, quasi-thermal source. We compare the single-photon, non-local oscillator to a more conventional local oscillator with uncertain photon number for a few different source distributions: Gaussian, 1 mm separated double slits, and 2 mm separated double slits. Both methods were able to return a source reconstruction or the source’s autocorrelation. We find that the non-local oscillator has a higher signal-to-noise ratio per detected coincidence compared to a classical local oscillator; confirming the reduction in shot noise by using a non-local oscillator.