Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Khakimov, R. I.
• Henson, B. M.
• Shin, D. K.
• Hodgman, S. S.
• Dall, R. G.
• Baldwin, K. G. H.
• Truscott, A. G.

Titel

Ghost imaging with atoms

Ist Teil von

• Nature (London), 2016-12, Vol.540 (7631), p.100-103

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group UK

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Ghost imaging is demonstrated using beams of correlated pairs of ultracold helium atoms, rather than photons, yielding a reconstructed image with submillimetre resolution. Ghost imaging with massive particles Ghost imaging achieves a feat that sounds impossible: the reconstruction of an image of an object using a beam of light that has never interacted with the object. The trick that makes it possible involves the use of two beams of correlated photons. One beam passes through the object to a bucket (single-pixel) detector, while the spatial profile of the second beam is measured by a high-resolution (multi-pixel) detector; but, this second beam never interacts with the object. Until now ghost imaging has been achieved only with photons, but here Andrew Truscott and colleagues report a technique for producing ghost images with massive particles—specifically, with ultracold helium atoms. Substituting photons in quantum mechanical experiments for massive particles could shed light on fundamental questions such as the quantum-to-classical transition. In addition, this methodology may facilitate applications such as real-time control of atom lithography while imaging the deposition remotely via the ghost imaging technique. Ghost imaging is a counter-intuitive phenomenon—first realized in quantum optics 1 , 2 —that enables the image of a two-dimensional object (mask) to be reconstructed using the spatio-temporal properties of a beam of particles with which it never interacts. Typically, two beams of correlated photons are used: one passes through the mask to a single-pixel (bucket) detector while the spatial profile of the other is measured by a high-resolution (multi-pixel) detector. The second beam never interacts with the mask. Neither detector can reconstruct the mask independently, but temporal cross-correlation between the two beams can be used to recover a ‘ghost’ image. Here we report the realization of ghost imaging using massive particles instead of photons. In our experiment, the two beams are formed by correlated pairs of ultracold, metastable helium atoms 3 , which originate from s -wave scattering of two colliding Bose–Einstein condensates 4 , 5 . We use higher-order Kapitza–Dirac scattering 6 , 7 , 8 to generate a large number of correlated atom pairs, enabling the creation of a clear ghost image with submillimetre resolution. Future extensions of our technique could lead to the realization of ghost interference 9 , and enable tests of Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen entanglement 9 and Bell’s inequalities 10 with atoms.