DISTINGUISHED QUANTUM COLLOQUIUM - Mankei Tsang, PhD

Resolving Starlight: A Quantum Perspective

The wave-particle duality of light introduces two fundamental problems to imaging, namely, the diffraction limit and the photon shot noise. Quantum information theory can tackle them both in one holistic formalism: model the light as a quantum object, consider any measurement, and pick the one that gives the best statistics. While Helstrom pioneered the theory and first applied it to incoherent imaging, it was not until recently that the approach offered a genuine surprise by predicting a new class of superior imaging methods. For the resolution of two sub-Rayleigh sources, the new methods have been shown theoretically and experimentally to outperform direct imaging and approach the true quantum limits. Recent generalizations of the theory for an arbitrary number of sources suggest that, despite the existence of harsh quantum limits, the quantum-inspired methods can still offer significant improvements for imaging general subdiffraction objects, potentially benefiting astronomy as well as fluorescence microscopy.

Mankei Tsang is a theorist with interests in quantum optics and quantum metrology. He obtained B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics from UCLA in 2002 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2004 and 2006, respectively. He held postdoctoral appointments with Demetri Psaltis at Caltech, with Jeffrey Shapiro and Seth Lloyd at MIT, and with Carlton Caves at the University of New Mexico. In 2011 he received the Singapore National Research Foundation Fellowship and moved to the National University of Singapore, where he is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Physics.