Abstract
Quantum illumination protocols can be implemented to improve imaging performance in the low photon flux regime even in the presence of both background light and sensor noise. However, the extent to which this noise can be rejected is limited by the rate of accidental correlations resulting from the detection of photon or noise events that are not quantum-correlated. Here we present an improved protocol that rejects up to gtrsim 99.9% of background light and sensor noise in the low photon flux regime, improving upon our previous results by an order of magnitude. This improvement, which requires no information regarding the scene or noise statistics, will enable extremely low light quantum imaging techniques to be applied in environments previously thought difficult and be an important addition to the development of covert imaging, quantum microscopes, and quantum LIDAR.
Highlights
Quantum illumination protocols can be implemented to improve imaging performance in the low photon flux regime even in the presence of both background light and sensor noise
In this work we implement a quantum illumination protocol to select the events that result from the detection of entangled photon-pairs, while preferentially rejecting accidentally correlated events caused by both background light and sensor noise
We demonstrated a significant improvement with regards to achievable background light and sensor noise rejection for a full-field quantum illumination protocol in a single photon regime, beyond that previously achieved, by using only information already available in the reference beam
Summary
Quantum illumination protocols can be implemented to improve imaging performance in the low photon flux regime even in the presence of both background light and sensor noise. In this work we implement a quantum illumination protocol to select the events that result from the detection of entangled photon-pairs, while preferentially rejecting accidentally correlated events caused by both background light and sensor noise. For each acquired frame a pixel-by-pixel AND-operation between the two regions of the array detector upon which the probe and reference beams are recorded is performed to identify the spatially correlated photon-pair events This operation serves to reject events resulting from uncorrelated background light and sensor noise. As the thermal illumination increased, the number of false correlations kept in the quantum illumination AND-image increased meaning that the classically illuminated component of the image could not be fully suppressed
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