Quantum holography, as depicted in this cartoon, is a way that physicists
could produce three-dimensional images of objects that would be invisible
to systems relying on classical physics. A source S produces two photon
beams (h1 and h2). The photons in h1 are quantum mechanically entangled
with the photons in h2. When a photon in h1 enters chamber C, it encodes
three-dimension information about the enclosed object (in this case
a Grecian bust) in the interference of the two paths it could take -
a path that intercepts the object and subsequently is reflected to the
chamber wall, and a path that misses the object and strikes the chamber
wall directly. The second beam, h2, passes through conventional optics
and strikes a detector array D. A coincidence counter extracts the holographic
information by monitoring the relative time between a photon in h1 striking
the chamber wall and its entangled mate in h2 arriving at detector D.
Reported by: Ayman F. Abouraddy, Bahaa E. A. Saleh, Alexander V. Sergienko,
and Malvin C. Teich, Optics
Express, 5 November 2001.
Associated
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