Related papers: Quantum hypothesis testing for exoplanet detection

The probability of the detection of Earth-like exoplanets may increase in the near future after the launch of the space missions using the transit photometry as observation method. By using this technique only the semi-major axis of the…

Loss measurements are at the base of spectroscopy and imaging, thus perme- ating all the branches of science, from chemistry and biology to physics and material science. However, quantum mechanics laws set the ultimate limit to the…

A stellar flare can brighten a planet in orbit around its host star, producing a light curve with a faint echo. This echo, and others from subsequent flares, can lead to the planet's discovery, revealing its orbital configuration and…

Classical optical interferometery requires maintaining live, phase-stable links between telescope stations. This requirement greatly adds to the cost of extending to long baseline separations, and limits on baselines will in turn limit the…

The act of measuring optical emissions from two remote qubits can entangle them. By demanding that a photon from each qubit reaches the detectors, one can ensure than no photon was lost. But the failure rate then rises quadratically with…

Resolving high-contrast targets is a fundamental yet highly challenging task in astronomy. Using quantum estimation theory, we demonstrate that the ultimate limit for estimating the separation between two unequal-brightness thermal sources…

Quantum illumination is a technique for detecting the presence of a target in a noisy environment by means of a quantum probe. We prove that the two-mode squeezed vacuum state is the optimal probe for quantum illumination in the scenario of…

Wave--particle duality is a hallmark of quantum mechanics. For bosonic systems, there exists a continuum of intermediate states bridging wave-like Schr\"odinger cat states and particle-like Fock states. Such states have recently been…

Imaging of planets is very difficult, due to the glare from their nearby, much brighter suns. Static and slowly-evolving aberrations are the limiting factors, even after application of adaptive optics. The residual speckle pattern is highly…

To understand quantum optics experiments, we must perform calculations that consider the principal sources of noise, such as losses, spectral impurity and partial distinguishability. In both discrete and continuous variable systems, these…

We consider the quantum field theory for a scalar model of the electromagnetic field interacting with a system of two-level atoms. In this setting, we show that it is possible to uniquely determine the density of atoms from measurements of…

We explore the possibility of using "weak" measurements to carry out quantum state tomography. Given a certain fixed number of copies of identically prepared states of a qubit, we simulate state tomography using weak as well as projective…

Direct measurement of quantum non-Gaussianity requires some variant of a discrete photon-resolving detection, which is feasible only for low mean photon numbers. For a large mean photon number, intensity detection by linear photodiodes…

A practical quantum measurement method based on the quantum nature of anti-bunching photon emission has been developed to detect single particles without the restriction of the diffraction limit. By simultane- ously counting the…

We present preliminary results from our on-going study: Comparing and optimizing source detection procedures for XMM images. By constructing realistic spatial and spectral source distributions and ``observing'' these through the XMM Science…

It has been recently suggested that optical interferometers may not require a phase-stable optical link between the stations if instead sources of quantum-mechanically entangled pairs could be provided to them, enabling extra-long baselines…

In astronomy, interferometry of light collected by separate telescopes is often performed by physically bringing the optical paths together in the form of Young's double-slit experiment. Optical loss severely limits the efficiency of this…

We realized the most fundamental quantum optical experiment to prove the non-classical character of light: Only a single quantum emitter and a single superconducting nanowire detector were used. A particular appeal of our experiment is its…

Indistinguishable quantum states interfere, but the mere possibility of obtaining information that could distinguish between overlapping states inhibits quantum interference. Quantum interference imaging can outperform classical imaging or…

In a previous paper, we discussed an original solution to improve the performances of coronagraphs by adding, in the optical scheme, an adaptive hologram removing most of the residual speckle starlight. In our simulations, the detection…