2021/08/31 by Bienvenu Ndagano, Hugo Defienne, Dominic Branford +5 · 135 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Digital Holography and Microscopy #Interference microscopy #Materials science #Microscopy #Nanotechnology #Near-Field Optical Microscopy #Optics #Optoelectronics #Physics #Quantum #Quantum interference #Quantum mechanics #Random lasers and scattering media #physics.optics #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41566-022-00980-6
published in Nature Photonics 16(5), 384-389 (Nature Portfolio)
arxiv created 2022/02/10 · openalex publication_date 2022/04/11 · arxiv updated 2022/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference, the bunching of indistinguishable photons at a beam splitter, is a staple of quantum optics and lies at the heart of many quantum sensing approaches and recent optical quantum computers. Here, we report a full-field, scan-free, quantum imaging technique that exploits HOM interference to reconstruct the surface depth profile of transparent samples. We demonstrate the ability to retrieve images with micrometre-scale depth features with a photon flux as small as 7 photon pairs per frame. Using a single photon avalanche diode camera we measure both the bunched and anti-bunched photon-pair distributions at the HOM interferometer output which are combined to provide a lower-noise image of the sample. This approach demonstrates the possibility of HOM microscopy as a tool for label-free imaging of transparent samples in the very low photon regime.