Biological Microscopy with Undetected Photons

Abstract

Novel imaging techniques utilizing nondegenerate, correlated photon pairs sparked intense interest during the last couple of years among scientists of the quantum optics community and beyond. It is a key property of such 'ghost imaging' or 'quantum interference' methods that they use those photons of the correlated pairs for imaging that never interacted with the sample, allowing detection in a spectral range different from that of the illumination of the object. Extensive applications of these techniques in spectroscopy and microscopy are envisioned, however, their limited spatial resolution to date has not yet supported real-life microscopic investigations of tiny biological objects. Here we report a modification of the method based on quantum interference by using a seeding laser and confocal scanning, that allows the improvement of the resolution of imaging with undetected photons by more than an order of magnitude, and we also present examples of application in the microscopy of biological samples.