Imaging incoherent point sources with quantum-inspired measurements

Every imaging technique has a resolution limit. The ability to image closely-separated point sources faces the diffraction limit, or “Rayleigh’s curse”. However, recent progress by Tsang et al. [Phys. Rev. X 6, 031033 (2016), New Journ. Phys. 19, 023054 (2017)] has dispelled the curse: the separation of two incoherent point sources has a non-vanishing Fisher information even as the separation goes to zero. The separation, and any statistical moment of the source distribution, can be estimated using quantum-information-inspired measurements that address information contained in the full electromagnetic field rather than the intensity alone. There has been an upstart of experiments showing this advantage over direct imaging techniques. In this talk I will review the recent experimental progress in our group [Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 070801 (2017)] which demonstrates an improved ability to estimate the separation distance between two sources, and our continuing efforts towards implementing these measurements in realistic imaging scenarios.