Related papers: Direct illumination calibration of telescopes at t…
In experiments requiring extreme darkness, such as experiments probing the limits of human vision, assessment of the background photon flux is essential. However, direct measurement thereof with standard single photon detectors is…
Detecting light is fundamental to all optical experiments and applications. At the single photon level, the quantised nature of light requires specialised detectors, which typically saturate for more than one photon, rendering the…
In a previous article we suggested a method to overcome the diffraction limit behind a telescope. We refer to theory and recent numerical simulations, and test whether it is indeed possible to use photon amplification to enhance the angular…
Engineering apparatus that harness quantum theory offers practical advantages over current technology. A fundamentally more powerful prospect is the long-standing prediction that such quantum technologies could out-perform any future…
With the progress of optical detection technology, the classical diffraction limit raised a hundred years ago has been continuously broken through. In previous experiments within fluorescence sources, one of the techniques used is detecting…
A two-level atom cannot emit more than one photon at a time. As early as the 1980s, this quantum feature was identified as a gateway to "single-photon sources", where a regular excitation sequence would create a stream of light particles…
We have used a precision calibrated photodiode as the fundamental metrology reference in order to determine the relative throughput of the PanSTARRS telescope and the Gigapixel imager, from 400 nm to 1050 nm. Our technique uses a tunable…
The direct photon spectrum is computed to the highest currently available precision and compared to ATLAS data from 8 TeV collisions at the LHC. The prediction includes threshold resummation at next-to-next-to-next-to-leading logarithmic…
We numerically investigate the role of quantum fluctuations in superresolution of optical objects. First, we confirm that when quantum fluctuations are not taken into account, one can easily improve the resolution by one order of magnitude…
Spectral diffusion is a result of random spectral jumps of a narrow line as a result of a fluctuating environment. It is an important issue in spectroscopy, because the observed spectral broadening prevents access to the intrinsic line…
Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy (FCS) yields measurement parameters (number of molecules, diffusion time) that characterize the concentration and kinetics of fluorescent molecules within a supposedly known observation volume. Absolute…
Single-photon detectors have achieved impressive performance, and have led to a number of new scientific discoveries and technological applications. Existing models of photodetectors are semiclassical in that the field-matter interaction is…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of the distribution of matter on sub-kpc scales. It can be used to test the existence of completely dark subhalos surrounding galaxies, as predicted by the standard cold dark matter model, or…
We study the limits of accuracy for weak lensing maps of dark matter using diffuse 21-cm radiation from the pre-reionization epoch using simulations. We improve on previous "optimal" quadratic lensing estimators by using shear and…
We report a measurement workflow free of systematic errors consisting of a reconfigurable photon-number-resolving detector, custom electronic circuitry, and faithful data-processing algorithm. We achieve unprecedentedly accurate measurement…
We have developed a method to measure the mirror reflectivity of telescopes. While it is relatively easy to measure the local reflectivity of the mirror material, it is not so straightforward to measure the amount of light that it focuses…
We consider a microscopy setting where quantum light is used for illumination. Spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) is used as a source of a heralded single photon, which is quantum light prepared in a Fock state. We present…
In absence of a lens to form an image, incoherent or partially coherent light scattering off an obstructive or reflective object forms a broad intensity distribution in the far field with only feeble spatial features. We show here that…
Single-photon detectors are ubiquitous in quantum information science and quantum sensing. They are key enabling technologies for numerous scientific discoveries and fundamental tests of quantum optics. Photon-number-revolving detectors are…
Light propagation in cosmology is usually studied in the geometrical optics approximation which requires the spacetime curvature to be much smaller than the light wavenumber. However, for non-fuzzy particle dark matter the curvature is…