University of Waterloo

Purpose

The Project will support the development of techniques and algorithms for low-light imaging and detection using novel time-bin interferometers and analyzers, which is usually used for quantum communications. The project team will apply these ideas to a system that includes imaging interferometers equipped with photon detection arrays, which overcome the issues for free-space photons exposed to scattering or turbulent media, while retrieving the phase and intensity information of each photon to recover their pattern with high visibility. Every photon arrival on every pixel can be individually logged with ~100 picosecond precision, and several 100 million photons per second can be detected across the array. These features will be exploited to develop a novel algorithm for analysis of the very faint (and noisy) images expected for a single-photon imaging device. Finally, the project will demonstrate phase encoding to enhance of contrast for distant objects, and study how to characterize their shape and motion.