Superradiant LIDAR

Abstract

In recent years, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) has seen a steep rise in the sensitivity of measuring the distances of remote objects. Here, we propose to enhance the sensitivity of LIDAR even further by exploiting Dicke's concept of superradiance, i.e., the collective light emission of statistically independent light sources. By using $N$ thermal light sources (TLS) and measuring intensity correlations of order $m \geq 2$ instead of $m=1$, i.e., the intensity, we show that the Cramér-Rao bound on the measurement of the distance of a remote object undercuts that of traditional LIDAR by a factor of $N$, and can be reduced further with increasing correlation order $m$. Our numerical calculations are supported by analytical expressions for the special cases of two and three TLS and a general approximate expression for any number of TLS.