English

Super-resolution of partially coherent bosonic sources

Quantum Physics 2026-05-20 v2

Abstract

We consider imaging of two partially coherent sources and derive the ultimate quantum limits for estimating the separation, location, relative intensity, and coherence factor. We show that super-resolution in the separation is achievable both in the presence of nuisance parameters as well as when some of the parameters are assumed known. Nuisance parameters restrict super-resolution to balanced sources, whereas for known parameters super-resolution persists over a broader range of relative intensities and is lost only for perfectly correlated sources, i.e., γ=1\gamma=1. The achievable precision is governed primarily by interference-induced photon statistics and depends strongly on the degree of coherence. In the sub-Rayleigh regime, the imaging problem reduces to an effective two-dimensional Hilbert space description, provided a consistent reference position is used, with all parameters encoded in a Bloch vector representation. Finally, indirect estimation schemes based on the purity of the image-plane state are generally suboptimal for all non-zero coherence and become valid only in the incoherent limit.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.04818,
  title  = {Super-resolution of partially coherent bosonic sources},
  author = {Joaquín López-Suárez and Michalis Skotiniotis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.04818},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

16 pages, 11 figures + appendix. Comments are welcome Revised version clarifying some issues