Thursday, October 31, 2013

The Generation of Super-Resolving Single-Photon Path-Entangled States

arXiv:1310.5575v1

by

Wei Feng, Kebei Jiang, Michelle L.-J. Lollie, M. Suhail Zubairy, Jonathan P. Dowling

One of the big drawbacks for using N00N states in quantum lithography is the need for a N-photon absorbing resist, which has a very low cross section for large N. In this paper, we propose two protocols for generating super-resolving single-photon path-entangled states from general maximally path-entangled N00N states. We also show that both protocols generate the desired state with different probabilities depending on the type of detectors being used. Such super-resolving single-photon path-entangled states preserve high resolving power but lack the requirement of a multi-photon absorbing resist, which makes this state, in principle, a perfect candidate for quantum lithography.