Comment on "Quantum Interferometric Optical Lithography: Exploiting Entanglement to Beat the Diffraction Limit"
The effective absorption rates in quantum lithography are very low.
As demonstrated by Boto et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 2733 (2000)], quantum lithography offers an increase in resolution below the diffraction limit. Here, we generalize this procedure in order to create patterns in one and two dimensions. This renders quantum lithography a potentially useful tool in nanotechnology.
Classical, interferometric, optical lithography is diffraction limited to writing features of a size lambda/2 or greater, where lambda is the optical wavelength. Using nonclassical photon number states, entangled N at a time, we show that it is possible to write features of minimum size lambda/(2N) in an N-photon absorbing substrate. This result surpasses the usual classical diffraction limit by a factor of N. Since the number of features that can be etched on a two-dimensional surface scales inversely as the square of the feature size, this allows one to write a factor of N^2 more elements on…
Quantum lithography achieves phase super-resolution using fragile, experimentally challenging entangled states of light. We propose a scalable scheme for creating features narrower than classically achievable, with reduced use of quantum resources and consequently enhanced resistance to loss. The scheme is an implementation of interferometric lithography using a mixture of an SPDC entangled state with intense classical coherent light. We measure coincidences of up to four photons mimicking multiphoton absorption. The results show a narrowing of the interference fringes of up to 30% with respec…
Spatial quantum enhancement effects are studied under a unified framework. It is shown that the multiphoton absorption rate of photons with a quantum-enhanced lithographic resolution is reduced, not enhanced, contrary to popular belief. The use of adiabatic soliton expansion is proposed to beat the standard quantum limit on the optical beam displacement accuracy, as well as to engineer an arbitrary multiphoton interference pattern for quantum lithography. The proposed scheme provides a conceptually simple method that works for an arbitrary number of photons.
Quantum lithography proposes to adopt entangled quantum states in order to increase resolution in interferometry. In the present paper we experimentally demonstrate that the output of a high-gain optical parametric amplifier can be intense yet exhibits quantum features, namely, sub-Rayleigh fringes, as proposed by Agarwal et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 1389 (2001)). We investigate multiphoton states generated by a high-gain optical parametric amplifier operating with a quantum vacuum input for a gain values up to 2.5. The visibility has then been increased by means of three-photon absorption. Th…
The smallest spot in optical lithography and microscopy is generally limited by diffraction. Quantum lithography, which utilizes interference between groups of N entangled photons, was recently proposed to beat the diffraction limit by a factor N. Here we propose a simple method to obtain N photons interference with classical pulses that excite a narrow multiphoton transition, thus shifting the "quantum weight" from the electromagnetic field to the lithographic material. We show how a practical complete lithographic scheme can be developed and demonstrate the underlying principles experimental…
Over the past 20 years, bright sources of entangled photons have led to a renaissance in quantum optical interferometry. Optical interferometry has been used to test the foundations of quantum mechanics and implement some of the novel ideas associated with quantum entanglement such as quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography, quantum lithography, quantum computing logic gates, and quantum metrology. In this paper, we focus on the new ways that have been developed to exploit quantum optical entanglement in quantum metrology to beat the shot-noise limit, which can be used, e.g., in fiber opti…
I propose a quantum imaging method that can beat the Rayleigh-Abbe diffraction limit and achieve de Broglie resolution without requiring a multiphoton absorber as the detector. Using the same non-classical states of light as those for quantum lithography, the proposed method requires only intensity measurements, followed by image post-processing, to produce the same complex image patterns as those in quantum lithography. The method is expected to be experimentally realizable using current technology.
We give a simple multiround strategy that permits to beat the shot noise limit when performing interferometric measurements even in the presence of loss. In terms of the average photon number employed, our procedure can achieve twice the sensitivity of conventional interferometric ones in the noiseless case. In addition, it is more precise than the (recently proposed) optimal two-mode strategy even in the presence of loss.
The sensitivity in interferometric measurements such as gravitational-wave detectors is ultimately limited by quantum noise of light. We discuss the use of feedback mechanisms to reduce the quantum effects of radiation pressure. Recent experiments have shown that it is possible to reduce the thermal motion of a mirror by cold damping. The mirror motion is measured with an optomechanical sensor based on a high-finesse cavity, and reduced by a feedback loop. We show that this technique can be extended to lock the mirror at the quantum level. In gravitational-waves interferometers with Fabry-Pero…
Interferometry with NOON quantum states can provide unbiased phase estimation with a sensitivity scaling as $Δθ\sim 1/N_T$ given a prior knowledge that the true phase shift $θ$ lies in the interval $-π\leq θ\leq π$. The protocol requires a total of $N_T = 2^{p}-1$ particles (unequally) distributed among $p$ independent measurements and overcomes basic difficulties present in previously proposed approaches. We demonstrate the possibility to obtain a phase sensitivity beating the classical shot-noise limit using published probabilities retrieved experimentally for the creation of Schrödinger cat…
We propose a method for preparing maximal path entanglement with a definite photon number N, larger than two, using projective measurements. In contrast with the previously known schemes, our method uses only linear optics. Specifically, we exhibit a way of generating four-photon, path-entangled states of the form |4,0> + |0,4>, using only four beam splitters and two detectors. These states are of major interest as a resource for quantum interferometric sensors as well as for optical quantum lithography and quantum holography.
Encoding schemes and error-correcting codes are widely used in information technology to improve the reliability of data transmission over real-world communication channels. Quantum information protocols can further enhance the performance in data transmission by encoding a message in quantum states, however, most proposals to date have focused on the regime of a large number of uses of the noisy channel, which is unfeasible with current quantum technology. We experimentally demonstrate quantum enhanced communication over an amplitude damping noisy channel with only two uses of the channel per…
It has long been thought that the sensitivity of laser interferometric gravitational-wave detectors is limited by the free-mass standard quantum limit, unless radical redesigns of the interferometers or modifications of their input/output optics are introduced. Within a fully quantum-mechanical approach we show that in a second-generation interferometer composed of arm cavities and a signal recycling cavity, e.g., the LIGO-II configuration, (i) quantum shot noise and quantum radiation-pressure-fluctuation noise are dynamically correlated, (ii) the noise curve exhibits two resonant dips, (iii) …
In the lore of quantum metrology, one often hears (or reads) the following no-go theorem: If you put vacuum into one input port of a balanced Mach-Zehnder Interferometer, then no matter what you put into the other input port, and no matter what your detection scheme, the sensitivity can never be better than the shot noise limit (SNL). Often the proof of this theorem is cited to be in Ref. [C. Caves, Phys. Rev. D 23, 1693 (1981)], but upon further inspection, no such claim is made there. A quantum-Fisher-information-based argument suggestive of this no-go theorem appears in Ref. [M. Lang and C.…
It is commonly maintained that entanglement is necessary to beat the shot noise limit in the sensitivity with which certain parameters can be measured in interferometric experiments. Here we show that, with a fluctuating number of two-mode bosons, the shot-noise limit can be beaten by non-entangled bosonic states with all bosons in one mode. For a given finite maximum number of bosons, we calculate the optimal one- and two-mode bosonic states, and show that in the absence of losses, NOON states are the optimal two-mode bosonic states.
We develop a general framework to describe interferometric coherent feedback loops and prove that, under any such scheme, the steady-state squeezing of a bosonic mode subject to a rotating wave coupling with a white noise environment and to any quadratic Hamiltonian must abide by a noise-dependent bound that reduces to the 3dB limit at zero temperature. Such a finding is contrasted, at fixed dynamical parameters, with the performance of homodyne continuous monitoring of the output modes. The latter allows one to beat coherent feedback and the 3dB limit under certain dynamical conditions, which…
Interferometry is a paradigm for most precision measurements. Using $N$ uncorrelated particles, the achievable precision for a two-mode (two-path) interferometer is bounded by the standard quantum limit (SQL), $1/\sqrt{N}$, due to the discrete (quanta) nature of individual measurements. Despite being a challenging benchmark, the two-mode SQL has been approached in a number of systems, including the LIGO and today's best atomic clocks. Employing multi-mode interferometry, the SQL becomes $1/[(M-1)\sqrt{N}]$ using M modes. Higher precision can also be achieved using entangled particles such that…
Quantum number-path entanglement is a resource for super-sensitive quantum metrology and in particular provides for sub-shotnoise or even Heisenberg-limited sensitivity. However, such number-path entanglement has thought to have been resource intensive to create in the first place --- typically requiring either very strong nonlinearities, or nondeterministic preparation schemes with feed-forward, which are difficult to implement. Recently in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 170802 (2015)] we showed that number-path entanglement from a BosonSampling inspired interferometer can be used to beat the shot-no…
For each optical topology of an interferometric gravitational wave detector, quantum mechanics dictates a minimum optical power (the ``energetic quantum limit'') to achieve a given sensitivity. For standard topologies, when one seeks to beat the standard quantum limit by a substantial factor, the energetic quantum limit becomes impossibly large. Intracavity readout schemes may do so with manageable optical powers.