Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has become a versatile and useful biological imaging technique. It is an interferometric scheme that makes use of a light source of short coherence time (broad spectrum) to carry out axial sectioning of a specimen.

The axial resolution of OCT is enhanced by increasing the spectral bandwidth of the source. However, as the bandwidth is increased the effects of group-velocity dispersion (GVD) become increasingly deleterious.

A quantum version of OCT, quantum optical coherence tomography (QOCT), that makes use of an entangled twin-photon light source has been introduced and proof-of-principle experiments have been carried out. A particular merit of QOCT is that it is inherently immune to the GVD effects of the medium by virtue of the frequency entanglement associated with the twin-photon pairs. In this presentation, I will review the progress in QOCT and will present the first experimental results with a real biological specimen. The presented results are the first demonstration of entanglement surviving the interaction with a biological system.

The axial resolution of QOCT is governed by the bandwidth of the entangled twin-photon light source. We present three different approaches for the generation of ultrabroadband entangled photons.


Seminar, 16th of October, 14:00h. Seminar Room

Hosted by Prof. Morgan Michell