Enhanced Thermal Object Imaging by Photon Addition or Subtraction

Understand

Long-baseline interferometry (LBI) is used to reconstruct the image of faint thermal objects.

• The image quality, for a given exposure time, is in general limited by a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
• We show theoretically that a significant increase of the SNR, in a LBI, is possible by adding or subtracting photons to the thermal beam.
• At low photon counts, photon addition-subtraction technology strongly enhances the image quality.