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. Quantum light allows microscopy at very low illumination levels, preventing damage to living cells from the light itself. To take advantage of this quantum light in some applications, like ghost imaging, detectors must be able to correlate the arrival of single photons, the two photons that form the entangled pairs. These detectors measure photon arrival very fast, in the picoseconds. New sensors are emerging after years of research and development that can provide these fast measurements. These detectors used to be just single pixels, but now they are reaching megapixel size. Therefore, they generate data extremely fast, too fast for the electronics in most 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. This allows scientists to literally watch single molecules moving around cells and interacting with different structures in cells. These new techniques will enable new understanding about how life works.