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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

#4
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.

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

#8

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.

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

#9
You don't even need to capture a photon coming from the object.

Shoot a red laser at a couple of non-linear crystals to split the photons into a red/infrared entangled pair. Now, send the infrared ones through the object and into the other crystal while you divert the red ones to a screen without touching the object. As you can no longer determine which infrared photon belongs to what entangled pair the information they ones had is now contained in the red photons instead - and an image of the object appears on the screen.

http://medienportal.univie.ac.at/presse/aktuelle-pressemeldu...

Who the hell needs magic when there's quantum physics.

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

#10
post #9

You don't even need to capture a photon coming from the object. Shoot a red laser at a couple of non-linear crystals to split the photons into a red/infrared entangled pair. Now, send the infrared ones through the object and into the other crystal while you divert the red ones to a screen without touching the object. As you can no longer determine which infrared photon belongs to what entangled pair the information t…

That's not quite what happens. Based on your description information about an object could travel faster than light.

You send light from cristal A to the object and then on to cristal B. You then construct the image using light from both cristals. The specific spookiness is only apparent when you try and track an individual photon.

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