APS March Meeting 2024
Monday–Friday, March 4–8, 2024;
Minneapolis & Virtual
Session W52: Photonic and Solid State Quantum Sensors
3:00 PM–6:00 PM,
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Room: 201AB
Sponsoring
Unit:
DQI
Chair: Anthony Brady, University of Arizona
Abstract: W52.00005 : Condition for quantum-limited superresolution of two incoherent optical sources with unknown photon numbers*
3:48 PM–4:00 PM
Abstract
Presenter:
Junyan Li
(Sun Yat-sen University)
Author:
Junyan Li
(Sun Yat-sen University)
Collaboration:
Pang team
Optical imaging is an important sensing technique that has contributed to various research areas, however, by the Rayleigh's criterion, when the widths of two closely located point sources are larger than the separation of the two sources, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between the two sources and the precision of measuring the separation vanishes using the classical direct imaging method. This severely limits the imaging resolution. Inspired by the quantum estimation theory, superresolution has been was proposed and demonstrated to overcome the limitation of the Rayleigh's criterion and achieve significant improvement of the precision in resolving the separation of two identical incoherent optical point sources. Henceforth, the superresolution has catched extensive re- search, but there are still some issues that confine the development of the superresolution technology, among which, the precision of superresolution would vanish for the two incoherent optical sources with unknown photon numbers when the separation between the two optical sources approaches zero arrtacted our attention. In this work, we analyze the precision of resolving two identical general incoherent optical sources in detail for the case with unknown photon numbers, and obtain the condition to realize the superresolution in that case. In particular, we find that when the photons numbers of two optical sources are sufficiently close but not necessarily the same, the superresolution can still have nonzero precision. We further consider the superresolution when the point-spread functions of the two optical sources are close but not exactly the same, and obtain the condition to realize the superresolution when the photon numbers of the two optical sources are unknown. The result shows that the competition between the difference of photon numbers, the difference of the two point-spread functions and the separation of the two optical sources determines the precision of superresolution, and the superresolution can have various precisions beyond the case when the separation is exactly zero. The results are finally illustrated by Gaussian point-spread functions.
*This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 12075323).