Sunday, April 6, 2008
Quantum Imaging and the Work of Seth Lloyd from MIT
This is the idea behind quantum imaging: create an entangled pair of photons and send one towards the object you want to image and hang on to the other.
If ever a field needed an injection of common sense, this is it. Step forward quantum theorist and all round bright spark Seth Lloyd from MIT. He’s taken the thinkin’ and given it a thorough shakin’ by the scruff of its neck.
Lloyd doesn’t give any credence to the ideas of reflection-free imaging but he’s found something almost as good. Lloyd has calculated that illuminating an object with entangled photons can reduce increase the signal to noise ratio of the reflected signal by a factor of 2^e, where e is the number of bits of entanglement. That’s an exponential improvement.
What’s more, the improvement occurs even if the entanglement is completely destroyed during the process of reflection. So quantum illumination could help image anything that is currently hard to distinguish because of noise.
That’s impressive but Lloyd’s ideas raise quite a few questions.
So although a clever piece of work, it could be a while before we’re posing for quantum snapshots from Kodak.
More from here
If ever a field needed an injection of common sense, this is it. Step forward quantum theorist and all round bright spark Seth Lloyd from MIT. He’s taken the thinkin’ and given it a thorough shakin’ by the scruff of its neck.
Lloyd doesn’t give any credence to the ideas of reflection-free imaging but he’s found something almost as good. Lloyd has calculated that illuminating an object with entangled photons can reduce increase the signal to noise ratio of the reflected signal by a factor of 2^e, where e is the number of bits of entanglement. That’s an exponential improvement.
What’s more, the improvement occurs even if the entanglement is completely destroyed during the process of reflection. So quantum illumination could help image anything that is currently hard to distinguish because of noise.
That’s impressive but Lloyd’s ideas raise quite a few questions.
So although a clever piece of work, it could be a while before we’re posing for quantum snapshots from Kodak.
More from here
Labels: Physics
PermaLink - Quantum Imaging and the Work of Seth Lloyd from MIT posted by Ecacofonix : 9:22 PM
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