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Physicists Take Low-Light Images Using Less Than One Photon per Pixel

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Re: Physicists Take Low-Light Images Using Less Than One Photon per Pixel

#11

I wonder if this could be used to boost resolution of SEM and similar devices with electrons instead of photons. It'd make imaging non-metallic objects a lot easier since you won't have to bombard it with as many electrons, potentially destroying the object you want to examine.

Unlikely. Resolution limits are determined by aperture and wavelength, which is unrelated to photon number. There may be other tricks that can get around those limits, but they will be quite different from this sort of photon-number stuff. Photon number is conjugate to phase, whereas to improve resolution you need to know phase very precisely, so the uncertainty in (and therefore the number of) photons goes up.

"Photon number is conjugate to phase' - I'd like to understand that better, is it the same as saying photon counting destroys phase information? Would it also hold true for gated counting?

Re: Physicists Take Low-Light Images Using Less Than One Photon per Pixel

#13
Maybe it's just my eyeballs, but it looks like the If the idea is getting targeted bits of information about an object, as in whether a feature is present or absent, the very low photon image might meet the need.

However, with photography as art, the requirements for image resolution would be much higher, much more similar to the multi-photon image examples.

So it would appear mileage varies: the minimal photon images suit the minimalist domain, but an ordinary high-resolution image would require many more photons/pixel to get the expected result.

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