Yung Tsz Kit, Liang Hong, Xi Jiawei, Tam Wing Yim, Li Jensen
Department of Physics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong, China.
Nanophotonics. 2022 Oct 24;12(3):579-588. doi: 10.1515/nanoph-2022-0499. eCollection 2023 Feb.
Two-photon interference is an important effect that is tightly related to the quantum nature of light. Recently, it has been shown that the photon bunching from the Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) effect can be used for quantum imaging in which sample properties (reflection/transmission amplitude, phase delay, or polarization) can be characterized at the pixel-by-pixel level. In this work, we perform Jones matrix imaging for an unknown object based on two-photon interference. By using a reference metasurface with panels of known polarization responses in pairwise coincidence measurements, the object's polarization responses at each pixel can be retrieved from the dependence of the coincidence visibility as a function of the reference polarization. The post-selection of coincidence images with specific reference polarization in our approach eliminates the need in switching the incident polarization and thus parallelized optical measurements for Jones matrix characterization. The parallelization in preparing input states, prevalent in any quantum algorithms, is an advantage of adopting two-photon interference in Jones matrix imaging. We believe our work points to the usage of metasurfaces in biological and medical imaging in the quantum optical regime.
双光子干涉是一种与光的量子特性紧密相关的重要效应。最近,研究表明,洪-欧-曼德尔(HOM)效应产生的光子聚束可用于量子成像,其中样品特性(反射/透射幅度、相位延迟或偏振)可在逐个像素的水平上进行表征。在这项工作中,我们基于双光子干涉对未知物体进行琼斯矩阵成像。通过在成对符合测量中使用具有已知偏振响应面板的参考超表面,可从符合可见度随参考偏振的函数依赖性中检索出物体在每个像素处的偏振响应。我们方法中对具有特定参考偏振的符合图像进行后选择,消除了切换入射偏振的需求,从而实现了用于琼斯矩阵表征的并行光学测量。在任何量子算法中普遍存在的制备输入态的并行化,是在琼斯矩阵成像中采用双光子干涉的一个优势。我们相信我们的工作为超表面在量子光学领域的生物和医学成像中的应用指明了方向。