July 2016
Spotlight Summary by Roarke Horstmeyer
Beyond the diffraction limit via optical amplification
One way to get a better glimpse of the stars is to build a bigger telescope. Astronomers are now planning to construct several telescopes with apertures that exceed 30 meters in diameter, which will improve our ability to resolve distant stellar phenomena and perhaps even help us detect exoplanents from earth. Creating giant telescopes, however, is also expensive and somewhat difficult. In this work, Kellerer and Ribak analyze another possible trick to see tiny features in the night sky. Their idea is based on an amplification process for light, which turns one incident photon into many. With a cascade of “stimulated” photons, it should be possible to localize a distant star or planet with higher accuracy than one could with just a standard telescope. Unfortunately, optical amplification can also be noisy, and this noise can ruin the astronomical image. To overcome unwanted noise, the authors get selective: first, they will only look at photons that arrive within a certain time window, and second they will only look for “bursts” of many amplified photons. Using these two insights, Kellerer and Ribak show that their technique can help surpass the resolution expected from a standard telescope, which in the future might lead to sharper images of our universe.
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Article Information
Beyond the diffraction limit via optical amplification
Aglaé N. Kellerer and Erez N. Ribak
Opt. Lett. 41(14) 3181-3184 (2016) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF