News › »FastG­host« • deve­lops a new micro­scope for quan­tum imaging

A rese­arch pro­ject fun­ded by the Euro­pean Union with about 3 mil­lion Euro is dedi­ca­ted to the deve­lo­p­ment of a che­mi­cally sel­ec­tive micro­scope based on quan­tum tech­no­logy (quan­tum ghost ima­ging). The »FastG­host« pro­ject star­ted with a kick­off event on Octo­ber 20, 2020.

Quan­tum ima­ging with non-clas­si­cally cor­re­la­ted pho­ton pairs has fun­da­men­tal advan­ta­ges over con­ven­tio­nal ima­ging moda­li­ties based on clas­si­cal light: This includes the pos­si­bi­lity of achie­ving high image qua­lity even with a very low num­ber of pho­tons. Fur­ther­more, the sam­ple inter­ac­tion and the spa­tial detec­tion on dif­fe­rent wave­lengths chan­nels are rele­vant advan­ta­ges of quan­tum ima­ging. This quan­tum tech­no­logy enables par­ti­cu­larly high-con­trast and infor­ma­tion-rich ima­ging of tis­sue with low radia­tion dose. Thus, it has a high poten­tial for appli­ca­tion in life sci­en­ces. So far, howe­ver, the results are only available theo­re­ti­cally and at the level of prin­ci­ple demonstrations.

The »FastG­host« pro­ject now aims to trans­late quan­tum ghost ima­ging from an expe­ri­men­tal approach into usable tech­no­logy. The aim is to deve­lop and imple­ment a micro­scope using the advan­ta­ges of non-clas­si­cal quan­tum sta­tes of light. This is inten­ded to demons­trate quan­tum ima­ging in the mid-infrared range (»MIR«) with a wave­length of up to 7 μm, a spa­tial reso­lu­tion of at least 5 μm, and at least 512 x 512 image pixels. It aims at taking no more than a second to take a sin­gle picture.

Such a micro­scope is a breakth­rough for quan­tum ima­ging tech­no­logy, but also for a variety of important appli­ca­ti­ons. The novel quan­tum micro­scopy can thus con­tri­bute to fully exploi­ting the quan­tum advan­ta­ges. Howe­ver, various sci­en­ti­fic and tech­no­lo­gi­cal inno­va­tions are requi­red for the imple­men­ta­tion of the micro­scope – inclu­ding the deve­lo­p­ment of effi­ci­ent sin­gle-pho­ton detec­tors in the mid-infrared range and fast sin­gle-pho­ton came­ras for cor­re­la­tion mea­su­re­ments. The part­ners of the »FastG­host« pro­ject will rese­arch these goals by 2023.

»FastG­host« partner

  • Fraun­ho­fer Insti­tute for Applied Optics and Pre­cis­ion Engi­nee­ring IOF, Jena / Germany
  • Fried­rich-Schil­ler-Uni­ver­si­tät Jena, Insti­tute of Applied Phy­sics, Jena / Germany
  • Sin­gle Quan­tum BV, Delft / Netherlands
  • Fon­da­zione Bruno Kess­ler, Trento / Italy
  • Kungliga Tekniska Hoegs­ko­lan, Stock­holm / Sweden

Fun­ded under H2020-EU.1.2.1. (grant agree­ment no. 899580) from Octo­ber 1st, 2020 to Sep­tem­ber 30th, 2023.

Web­links

November 30th, 2020

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