An entanglement-enhanced microscope

Among the applications of optical phase measurement, the differential interference contrast microscope is widely used for the evaluation of opaque materials or biological tissues. However, the signal-to-noise ratio for a given light intensity is limited by the standard quantum limit, which is critic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2013, Vol.4 (1), p.2426-2426, Article 2426
Main Authors: Ono, Takafumi, Okamoto, Ryo, Takeuchi, Shigeki
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
639/624/1075
639/624/1107/328
Humanities and Social Sciences
Microscopy - instrumentation
Microscopy, Atomic Force
Microscopy, Confocal
Microscopy, Interference
multidisciplinary
Photons
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Signal-To-Noise Ratio
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Summary:Among the applications of optical phase measurement, the differential interference contrast microscope is widely used for the evaluation of opaque materials or biological tissues. However, the signal-to-noise ratio for a given light intensity is limited by the standard quantum limit, which is critical for measurements where the probe light intensity is limited to avoid damaging the sample. The standard quantum limit can only be beaten by using N quantum correlated particles, with an improvement factor of √N. Here we report the demonstration of an entanglement-enhanced microscope, which is a confocal-type differential interference contrast microscope where an entangled photon pair ( N =2) source is used for illumination. An image of a Q shape carved in relief on the glass surface is obtained with better visibility than with a classical light source. The signal-to-noise ratio is 1.35±0.12 times better than that limited by the standard quantum limit. In microscopy, the standard quantum limit represents the best achievable signal-to-noise ratio for a given light intensity. Here, the authors build an optical microscope that uses entanglement between photon pairs to overcome this barrier.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/ncomms3426