Quantum enhanced bioimaging and sensing via strong quantum entanglement on chip

High-resolution imaging of subcellular and extracellular structures of biological samples is crucial for broad applications in biological, medical, clinical, and material research. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a powerful optical imaging technique capable of providing high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging of the internal microstructures of material samples and biological tissues in a non-contact and non-destructive manner. However, its imaging resolution is fundamentally limited by the spectral bandwidth of the light source, which is susceptible to the degrading effect of dispersion. This problem can be resolved by quantum OCT (QOCT) that uses quantum-entangled photon pairs as the light source for OCT. QOCT not only offers a higher axial resolution, but it is also intrinsically immune to the dispersion effect and robust to material loss, due to the inherent time-energy quantum entanglement. Unfortunately, QOCT faces an outstanding challenge in its low measurement sensitivity due to the low flux of entangled photons available for imaging. We proposed to develop a novel integrated QOCT approach and system, based upon a chip-scale fully integrated ultrabright and ultra-broadband entangled photon source that will elegantly resolve all the challenges encountered in current OCT and QOCT approaches. The proposed approach will utilize a novel technology recently developed by the team members. In comparison with conventional approaches, the proposed QOCT imaging approach and system is expected to offer more than 10000× improvement in measurement sensitivity and acquisition time, 10× increase in imaging resolution down to sub-micron regime, and 100× reduction of the system footprint. The chip-scale fully integrated approach enables wafer-scale mass production of the quantum light source that will dramatically reduce the cost. The focus of our Phase I project is to develop and prototype the proposed QOCT system and to prove the feasibility of the proposed QOCT approach. As such, the goals of the Phase 1 effort are two folds: 1) to identify the device geometry of the quantum light source chip that fits best the application in QOCT; 2) to identify optimal QOCT system configuration that maximizes the imaging performance with the integrated quantum light source. The proposed project, if successful, will offer to the market the first commercially available cost-effective integrated QOCT system that provides superior imaging performance. The proposed approach significantly elevates the capability of QOCT, making QOCT a real practical bio-imaging technology. The implementation of a chip-scale quantum light source that can be mass produced on the whole wafer scale will dramatically reduce the cost of the imaging system, making it appealing to commercial market. The proposed QOCT system will offer an immediate solution to in-vivo real-time imaging of subcellular and extracellular biological structures that is critical for broad biological, medical, and clinical applications. Moreover, high-performance entangled photon pair source chip itself is of immense importance for the development and implementation of distributed quantum network that is expected to significantly advance communication and computing capabilities. This SBIR effort aims to directly fulfill these emerging market demands.