English

Quantum superresolution in fluorescence microscopy

Quantum Physics 2013-07-12 v2 Optics

Abstract

The optical diffraction limit, formulated by Abbe 140 years ago, imposes a bound on imaging resolution in classical optics. Over the last twenty years, many theoretical schemes have been presented for overcoming the diffraction barrier in optical imaging using quantum properties of light. An experimental realization of sub-diffraction limited quantum imaging has, however, remained elusive. Here, we demonstrate a quantum imaging method taking advantage of non-classical light naturally produced in fluorescence microscopy due to photon antibunching, a fundamentally quantum phenomenon prohibiting simultaneous emission of multiple photons. Using a photon counting digital camera, we detect antibunching-induced second and third order intensity correlations and perform sub-diffraction limited quantum imaging in a standard wide-field fluorescence microscope.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1212.6003,
  title  = {Quantum superresolution in fluorescence microscopy},
  author = {O. Schwartz and J. M. Levitt and R. Tenne and S. Itzhakov and Z. Deutsch and D. Oron},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.6003},
  year   = {2013}
}
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