Accelerating Quantum Imaging with an Ultra High Speed Imaging Platform with End User Programmable FPGA and GPU

Scientific imaging is on the verge of a quantum revolution. Entangled photon microscopy techniques have proven that using quantum correlations, classical imaging limits in spatial resolution, shot noise, and spectral resolution can be broken. To take advantage of this quantum light in some applications, like ghost imaging, detectors must correlate the arrival of single photons, the two photons that form the entangled pair. New sensors are emerging after years of research and development that can provide these fast measurements. These detectors measure single photon arrival on the picosecond timescale. These detectors are now reaching megapixel size. They generate data extremely fast, too fast for the electronics in current scientific cameras. This has limited research using these sensors to just small bursts of data. But now we are building a very high speed camera platform that can capture and record this data continuously. During Phase I we proved we can record data continuously at over 12 GBytes/sec from deeply cooled single photon detectors. In Phase II, we are building the complete camera and supporting software. This will allow scientists to literally watch single molecules moving around cells and interacting with different structures in cells. These new techniques will enable new understanding about biology.