Electro-Optical Sampling of Single-Cycle THz Fields with Single-Photon Detectors.

Electro-optical sampling of Terahertz fields with ultrashort pulsed probes is a well-established approach for directly measuring the electric field of THz radiation. This technique usually relies on balanced detection to record the optical phase shift brought by THz-induced birefringence. The sensitivity of electro-optical sampling is, therefore, limited by the shot noise of the probe pulse, and improvements could be achieved using quantum metrology approaches using, e.

An All-Dielectric Metasurface Polarimeter.

The polarization state of light is a key parameter in many imaging systems. For example, it can image mechanical stress and other physical properties that are not seen with conventional imaging and can also play a central role in quantum sensing. However, polarization is more difficult to image, and polarimetry typically involves several independent measurements with moving parts in the measurement device.

Two-photon quantum interference and entanglement at 2.1 μm.

Quantum-enhanced optical systems operating within the 2- to 2.5-μm spectral region have the potential to revolutionize emerging applications in communications, sensing, and metrology. However, to date, sources of entangled photons have been realized mainly in the near-infrared 700- to 1550-nm spectral window.

Distinguishing between nonorthogonal quantum states of a single nuclear spin.

An important task for quantum-information processing is optimal discrimination between two nonorthogonal quantum states, which until now has been realized only optically. Here, we present and compare experimental realizations of optimal quantum measurements for distinguishing between two nonorthogonal quantum states encoded in a single (14)N nuclear spin at a nitrogen-vacancy defect in diamond. Implemented measurement schemes are the minimum-error measurement (known as Helstrom measurement), unambiguous state discrimination using a standard projective measurement, and optimal unambiguous state discrimination [known as Ivanovic-Dieks-Peres (IDP) measurement], which utilizes a three-dimensional Hilbert space.

Nanometric depth resolution from multi-focal images in microscopy.

We describe a method for tracking the position of small features in three dimensions from images recorded on a standard microscope with an inexpensive attachment between the microscope and the camera. The depth-measurement accuracy of this method is tested experimentally on a wide-field, inverted microscope and is shown to give approximately 8 nm depth resolution, over a specimen depth of approximately 6 µm, when using a 12-bit charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and very bright but unresolved particles. To assess low-flux limitations a theoretical model is used to derive an analytical expression for the minimum variance bound.