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Previous work showed that thermal light with a blackbody spectrum cannot be decomposed into a mixture of independent localized pulses. However, we find that in the weak-source limit and under the assumption of a flat spectrum, the first nonvacuum term in the state expansion does form a mixture of such pulses. This decomposition is essential for quantum-enhanced astronomical interferometry, which typically operates on localized pulses even though stellar light is inherently continuous-wave. We present a quantum derivation of the van Cittert–Zernike theorem that incorporates finite bandwidth, thereby justifying the operations on localized pulses while processing continuous-wave thermal light. For general spectra in the weak-source limit, we establish a criterion under which correlations between pulses can be safely neglected. When this criterion is not met, we provide a corrected strategy that accurately accounts for both the spectral profile and the detector-defined pulse shape. 

We propose a method to build an astronomical interferometer using continuous-variable quantum teleportation to overcome transmission loss between distant telescopes. The scheme relies on two-mode squeezed states shared by distant telescopes as entanglement resources, which are distributed using continuous-variable quantum repeaters. We find the optimal measurement on the teleported states, which uses beam splitters and photon-number-resolved detection. Compared to prior proposals relying on discrete states, our scheme has the advantages of using linear optics to implement it without wasting stellar photons, and making use of multiphoton events, which are regarded as noise in previous discrete schemes. We also outline the parameter regimes in which our scheme outperforms the direct detection method, schemes utilizing distributed discrete-variable entangled states, and local heterodyne techniques. 

Quantum entanglement-based imaging promises significantly increased resolution by extending the spatial separation of optical collection apertures used in very-long-baseline interferometry for astronomy and geodesy. We report a tabletop entanglement-based interferometric imaging technique that utilizes two entangled field modes serving as a phase reference between two apertures. The spatial distribution of a simulated thermal light source is determined by interfering light collected at each aperture with one of the entangled fields and performing joint measurements. This experiment demonstrates the ability of entanglement to implement interferometric imaging. 

We propose two optimal phase-estimation schemes that can be used for quantum-enhanced long-baseline interferometry. By using distributed entanglement, it is possible to eliminate the loss of stellar photons during transmission over the baselines. The first protocol is a sequence of gates using nonlinear optical elements, optimized over all possible measurement schemes to saturate the Cramér-Rao bound. The second approach builds on an existing protocol, which encodes the time of arrival of the stellar photon into a quantum memory. Our modified version reduces both the number of ancilla qubits and the number of gate operations by a factor of two. 

Broadband quantum memory is critical to enabling the operation of emerging photonic quantum technology at high speeds. Here we review a central challenge to achieving broadband quantum memory in atomic ensembles—what we call the ‘linewidth-bandwidth mismatch’ problem—and the relative merits of various memory protocols and hardware used for accomplishing this task. We also review the theory underlying atomic ensemble quantum memory and its extensions to optimizing memory efficiency and characterizing memory sensitivity. Finally, we examine the state-of-the-art performance of broadband atomic ensemble quantum memories with respect to three key metrics: efficiency, memory lifetime, and noise. 

We measure 95.6±0.3% storage efficiency of ultrafast photons in a collisionally broadened barium vapor quantum memory. We measure 31±1% total efficiency, limited by control field power, and a 0.515(6) ns lifetime, limited by motional dephasing.