Events on Thursday, December 11th, 2025
- Quantum computational enhanced optical imaging
- Time: 10:00 am - 6:00 pm
- Place: 5310 Chamberlin
- Speaker: Johannes Borregaard, Harvard
- Abstract: High-resolution optical imaging underpins applications from exoplanet detection and satellite monitoring to molecular imaging. Classical methods rely on tomographic reconstruction and post-processing to remove background noise, which comes with prohibitive measurement overhead and stability requirements for weak sources. In this talk, I will introduce a fundamentally different approach that replaces tomographic analysis with direct quantum processing of photonic information. Building on recent demonstrations of coherent photon-to-qubit transduction (arXiv:2509.09464), asynchronously arriving photons can be stored in quantum memories and interfered through quantum algorithms to remove background noise without tomographic reconstruction. Applied to exoplanet imaging, our estimates show several-orders-of-magnitude improvement under realistic conditions using quantum circuits of only hundreds of gates and tens of qubits. The approach generalizes to other tasks such as molecular imaging, satellite monitoring, and adaptive optics, opening new opportunities for quantum-enhanced imaging with near term quantum computers.
- Host: Josiah Sinclair