Institute of Physics is part of next-gen, quantum optics microscope

The “All Solid-State Super-Twinning Photon Microscope”, or SUPERTWIN, project is a collaborative research effort funded by the European Union. Part of Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, SUPERTWIN launched on March 1^st 2016 with a 3-year grant of 3.9 million Euros, and is coordinated by Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy) in a consortium of nine leading European experts, including EPFL’s Institute of Physics (LASPE).

SUPERTWIN aims to develop a highly innovative microscopy technique that will exploit the principles of quantum photonics to overcome the limitations of existing optical microscopes. The resolution of current optical microscopes is limited at about half the wavelength of a photon. This is called the “Rayleigh limit”.

Overcoming the Rayleigh limit has been difficult. One way is the Scanning Near-field Optical Microscope (SNOM), which performs a complex, high precision, time consuming 2D scan of the sample under investigation to generate a full image. Other limit-breaking techniques do exist, but they all require fluorescence. Since most objects under study are not fluorescent, that means that they first need to be prepared by treating them with fluorescent dyes.

SUPERTWIN will address the problem by developing a prototype microscope that exploits entangled photons to overcome the limits of classical optics. Entangled photons are elementary particles of light that share a certain property, meaning that that their states are strongly correlated as if they were connected by an invisible link.

If successful, the SUPERTWIN microscope will introduce a radically new line of technology for super-resolution imaging devices that exploit the principles of quantum optics. The new paradigm of optical imaging is expected to trigger “the development of novel microscopy systems that will surpass existing super-resolution microscopy techniques.”

The SUPERTWIN microscope comprises three main building blocks:

1. Solid-state emitters based on advanced group-III nitride and III-V alloy epitaxial growths and wafer processing techniques to generate highly entangled photon states;
2. Single-photon detector arrays with data pre-processing capabilities manufactured in an optimized advanced CMOS technology node to record spatio-temporal multi-photon interference patterns; and
3. Dedicated data processing algorithms aimed at extracting the image of the illuminated object from the statistics of scattered entangled photons.

The SUPERTWIN consortium is highly multidisciplinary, and includes experts in Quantum Physics, Photonics, CMOS Image Sensors manufacturing, Solid-state Photon Sensing, and a potential industrial end-user of the technology.

SUPERTWIN members:

1. Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy, project coordinator)
2. A.P.E. Research srl (Italy)
3. Centre Suisse d'Electronique et Microtechnique (Switzerland)
4. III-V Lab (France)
5. Single Quantum (Netherlands)
6. University of Bern (Switzerland)
7. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
8. Institute of Physics, National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (Belarus)
9. LFoundry S.r.l. (Italy)