Ghost Imaging: What is quantum, what is not

Abstract

We provide a unified treatment of classical and quantum Gaussian-state sources that unambiguously identifies which features of ghost imaging are strictly quantum mechanical. We show that ghost-image formation is fundamentally classical, with the image being expressible in terms of the phase-insensitive and phase-sensitive cross correlations between the detected fields. We then consider ghost-imaging scenarios with either phase-insensitive or phase-sensitive sources, where the former are always classical but the latter may be classical or quantum mechanical. We show that if their auto-correlations are identical, then a quantum source provides resolution improvement in its near-field and field-of-view improvement in its far field when compared to a classical source.