Research Brings Quantum Holography Closer to Reality

Quantum effects, at a macroscopic level, are generally drowned out by mechanical and thermal vibrations that immerse our everyday experience. In the past few decades, scientists and engineers have been paying more attention to harnessing the quantum properties of matter at a subatomic level to help develop technologies such as quantum communications, quantum computing and quantum imaging.

One example of quantum imaging under examination by Markus Gräfe and colleagues from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering IOF in Jena, Germany, is a new type of holography technique from single photons that record the hologram without detecting the photons themselves.

In classical optical holography, the hologram is the result of the interference of two input beams with mutual coherence. One beam serves as the reference beam. The other beam (object beam) illuminates an object and generates reflected/ transmitted light that bears information of the spatial structure of the object. The profile (width of and spacing between lines) of the interference pattern, resulting from combining the object and reference beams, is recorded in the hologram.