Quantum enhanced optical imaging

Advances in quantum optics are enabling a new approach to optical imaging in which optical fields gathered by spatially separated receivers can be mapped into quantum memories and subsequently interfered through controlled quantum operations. This makes it possible to coherently combine information carried by photons that arrive at different times or at different locations. Imaging tasks can then be formulated as operations acting on stored optical states encoded in qubit registers, allowing quantum algorithms to be used to extract parameters of interest more efficiently than is possible with classical direct detection and post-processing techniques. In this talk, I will discuss recent experimental and theoretical developments showing how these ideas can be implemented under realistic loss and noise conditions, and how they become particularly powerful in regimes of high contrast and weak optical imaging, as commonly encountered in astronomical and related imaging settings.