Li Shuo, Li Wenchao, Yakovlev Vladislav V, Kealy Allison, Greentree Andrew D
Opt Express. 2022 Apr 11;30(8):12495-12509. doi: 10.1364/OE.454412.
The fundamental understanding of biological pathways requires minimally invasive nanoscopic optical resolution imaging. Many approaches to high-resolution imaging rely on localization of single emitters, such as fluorescent molecules or quantum dots. Additionally, the exact determination of the number of such emitters in an imaging volume is essential for a number of applications; however, in standard intensity-based microscopy it is not possible to determine the number of individual emitters within a diffraction limited spot without initial knowledge of system parameters. Here we explore how quantum measurements of the emitted photons using photon number resolving detectors can be used to address this challenging task. In the proposed new approach, the problem of counting emitters reduces to the task of determining differences between the emitted photon distribution and the Poisson limit. We show that quantum measurements of the number of photons emitted from an ensemble of emitters enable the determination of both the number of emitters and the probability of emission. This method can be applied for any type of single-photon emitters. The scaling laws of this new approach are presented by the Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds, and this technique has great potential in quantum optical imaging with nanoscopic resolution.
对生物途径的基本理解需要微创纳米级光学分辨率成像。许多高分辨率成像方法依赖于单个发射器的定位，例如荧光分子或量子点。此外，对于许多应用而言，准确确定成像体积中此类发射器的数量至关重要；然而，在标准的基于强度的显微镜中，如果没有系统参数的初始知识，就无法确定衍射极限光斑内单个发射器的数量。在这里，我们探讨如何使用光子数分辨探测器对发射光子进行量子测量，以解决这一具有挑战性的任务。在提出的新方法中，计数发射器的问题简化为确定发射光子分布与泊松极限之间差异的任务。我们表明，对一组发射器发射的光子数进行量子测量能够确定发射器的数量和发射概率。这种方法可应用于任何类型的单光子发射器。这种新方法的缩放定律由克拉美-罗下界给出，并且该技术在具有纳米级分辨率的量子光学成像中具有巨大潜力。
