High-performance quantum imaging at telecom band with enhanced noise resilience

• Published in: APL photonics Vol. 10; no. 7; pp. 076115 - 076115-13
• Main Authors: Fan, Xiaodong, Ou, Zhonghua, Fan, Yunru, Xie, Zongliang, Li, Hao, Zhang, Lixun, Wang, Pinghe, Deng, Guangwei, Song, Haizhi, Wang, You, Zhang, Ji, Liu, Shuang, You, Lixing, Guo, Guangcan, Zhou, Qiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: AIP Publishing LLC 01.07.2025
• ISSN: 2378-0967; 2378-0967
• DOI: 10.1063/5.0260265

Quantum imaging utilizes the correlation of photons to enhance the security, covertness, and noise resilience of optical imaging. Despite recent advances, developing a quantum imaging system with long-distance and strong noise resilience remains challenging. Here, we present an experimental demonstration of high-performance quantum imaging at telecom band with enhanced noise resilience. We use a fiber-integrated quantum light source via cascaded second-order nonlinear processes to generate high-quality correlated/entangled photon pairs at telecom band and a fiber-coupled confocal optical system to effectively suppress the background noise and improve the collection efficiency of echo signal photons by optimizing its bandwidth and aperture. In our demonstration, the quantum imaging with correlated/entangled photon pairs or heralded single photons is achieved at a distance of 11 m under indoor illumination. When the detected environment noise is 33 dB stronger than the signal photons, corresponding to a coincidence-to-accidental coincidence ratio of 1.7 ± 0.1, an imaging contrast of 0.23 ± 0.09 is achieved, which is 46 times higher than single-photon imaging without correlation. The results will open venues for the development of practical quantum imaging techniques.