Quadrature Shadow Imaging with Thermal Light

A number of biological objects can only tolerate very low light exposure. This makes imaging them a challenging task since the detection of very low-power optical fields is strongly affected by the dark noise of a camera.

This problem can be resolved by using ultra-low noise detectors, but they are expensive and bulky. Recently, our group has demonstrated the quadrature shadow imaging method (QSI) that relies on the analysis of the quantum noise of quadrature squeezed vacuum. Here, we expand this method and demonstrated that the same technique can be applied to a weak thermal state with super-Poissonian statistics, which can potentially greatly broaden the applicability of this method to the systems for which squeezed vacuum sources do not exist. This work was funded by Grant No. AFOSR FA9550-19-1-0066.