Superresolution imaging with multiparameter quantum metrology in passive remote sensing

Abstract

We study super-resolution imaging theoretically using a distant $n$-mode interferometer in the microwave regime for passive remote sensing, used, e.g., for satellites like the ``Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity'' (SMOS) mission to observe the surface of the Earth. We give a complete quantum-mechanical analysis of multiparameter estimation of the temperatures on the source plane. We find the optimal detection modes by combining incoming modes with an optimized unitary that enables the most informative measurement based on photon counting in the detection modes and saturates the quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound from the symmetric logarithmic derivative for the parameter set of temperatures. In our numerical analysis, we achieved a quantum-enhanced super-resolution by reconstructing an image using the maximum likelihood estimator with a pixel size of 3 km, which is ten times smaller than the spatial resolution of SMOS with comparable parameters. Further, we find the optimized unitary for uniform temperature distribution on the source plane, with the temperatures corresponding to the average temperatures of the image. Even though the corresponding unitary was not optimized for the specific image, it still gives a super-resolution compared to local measurement scenarios for the theoretically possible maximum number of measurements.