Higher Order Quantum Ghost Imaging with Ultra-Cold Atoms

Abstract

Ghost imaging is a quantum optics technique that uses correlations between two beams to reconstruct an image in one beam from photons that do not interact with the object being imaged. While pairwise (second order) correlations are usually used to create the image, higher order correlations can be utilized to improve the performance of ghost imaging. In this paper, we demonstrate higher order atomic ghost imaging, using entangled ultracold metastable helium atoms from an s-wave collision halo. We construct higher order ghost images up to 5th order and show that using higher order correlations can improve the visibility of the images without impacting the resolution. This is the first demonstration of higher order ghost imaging with massive particles and the first higher order ghost imaging protocol of any type using a quantum source.