Single-shot compressed ultrafast photography: a review

Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is a burgeoning single-shot computational imaging technique that provides an imaging speed as high as 10 trillion frames per second and a sequence depth of up to a few hundred frames. This technique synergizes compressed sensing and the streak camera technique to capture nonrepeatable ultrafast transient events with a single shot. With recent unprecedented technical developments and extensions of this methodology, it has been widely used in ultrafast optical imaging and metrology, ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopy, and information security protection. We review the basic principles of CUP, its recent advances in data acquisition and image reconstruction, its fusions with other modalities, and its unique applications in multiple research fields

Single-particle-sensitive imaging of freely propagating ultracold atoms

We present a novel imaging system for ultracold quantum gases in expansion. After release from a confining potential, atoms fall through a sheet of resonant excitation laser light and the emitted fluorescence photons are imaged onto an amplified CCD camera using a high numerical aperture optical system. The imaging system reaches an extraordinary dynamic range, not attainable with conventional absorption imaging. We demonstrate single-atom detection for dilute atomic clouds with high efficiency where at the same time dense Bose-Einstein condensates can be imaged without saturation or distortion. The spatial resolution can reach the sampling limit as given by the 8 \mu m pixel size in object space. Pulsed operation of the detector allows for slice images, a first step toward a 3D tomography of the measured object. The scheme can easily be implemented for any atomic species and all optical components are situated outside the vacuum system. As a first application we perform thermometry on rubidium Bose-Einstein condensates created on an atom chip.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figures. v2: as publishe

Optimal control of light propagation through multiple-scattering media in the presence of noise

We study the control of coherent light propagation through multiple-scattering media in the presence of measurement noise. In our experiments, we use a two-step optimization procedure to find the optimal incident wavefront. We conclude that the degree of optimal control of coherent light propagation through a multiple-scattering medium is only determined by the number of photoelectrons detected per single speckle spot. The prediction of our model agrees well with the experimental results. Our results offer opportunities for imaging applications through scattering media such as biological tissue in the shot noise limit