Abstract
The possibility to reduce the effect of optical aberrations has been proposed in several publications on classical ghost imaging. The two-armed ghost-imaging systems make use of spatially incoherent illumination and point-by-point scanned intensity-correlation measurements in the arms. In this work, we introduce a novel ghostlike imaging method that uses a Mach-Zehnder interferometer and is based on optical-field interference instead of intensity correlations. The method allows us to obtain sharp images of microscopic objects even in the presence of severe aberrations that completely destroy the intensity-based image. Furthermore, pure phase objects can be imaged with micrometer-scale resolution in the presence of strong aberrations, which has not been demonstrated previously with a correlation-based imaging technique. In the setup, we use a light-emitting diode source and an ordinary camera as the only light detector. The imaging approach that we put forward in this work may find significant applications in advanced optical microscopy, optical coherence tomography, and a variety of interferometric sensors and detectors.
Highlights
Some optical imaging techniques have been shown to reduce the influence of optical aberrations on the image quality
We introduced a single-camera ghostlike imaging microscope based on optical-field interference instead of intensity-correlation measurements
Even by destroying the beam transmitted by the sample with an optical diffuser, perfectly sharp images are obtained from the interferometric data
Summary
Some optical imaging techniques have been shown to reduce the influence of optical aberrations on the image quality. One of them is optical ghost imaging which is a technique that retrieves images from spatial correlations of optical beams in two arms of an imaging system.. The correlations are obtained either from photon-coincidence or intensity-fluctuation measurements. The illumination is prepared by splitting spatially incoherent light into two beams. The rate of the detected photon coincidences or the correlations of the intensity fluctuations measured by the detectors in the two arms as a function of the transverse coordinates reveal an object image. The photon-coincidence detection was replaced with classical intensity-correlation measurements and the same results were obtained.. The intensity fluctuations in the illumination are usually slow as obtained by transmitting a spatially coherent optical beam through a rotating optical diffuser The effect was interpreted as a quantum-mechanical phenomenon in terms of photon entanglement in the two arms. Later, the photon-coincidence detection was replaced with classical intensity-correlation measurements and the same results were obtained. The intensity fluctuations in the illumination are usually slow as obtained by transmitting a spatially coherent optical beam through a rotating optical diffuser
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