2006/12/10 by Baris I. Erkmen, Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Erkmen, Baris I. +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Digital Holography and Microscopy #FOS: Physical sciences #Near-Field Optical Microscopy #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Random lasers and scattering media
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0612070
openalex publication_date 2006/12/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We provide a unified treatment of classical and quantum Gaussian-state sources that unambiguously identifies which features of ghost imaging are strictly quantum mechanical. We show that ghost-image formation is fundamentally classical, with the image being expressible in terms of the phase-insensitive and phase-sensitive cross correlations between the detected fields. We then consider ghost-imaging scenarios with either phase-insensitive or phase-sensitive sources, where the former are always classical but the latter may be classical or quantum mechanical. We show that if their auto-correlations are identical, then a quantum source provides resolution improvement in its near-field and field-of-view improvement in its far field when compared to a classical source.