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arXiv · 2103.05860

Single-photon imaging over 200 km

Abstract

Long-range active imaging has widespread applications in remote sensing and target recognition. Single-photon light detection and ranging (lidar) has been shown to have high sensitivity and temporal resolution. On the application front, however, the operating range of practical single-photon lidar systems is limited to about tens of kilometers over the Earth's atmosphere, mainly due to the weak echo signal mixed with high background noise. Here, we present a compact coaxial single-photon lidar system capable of realizing 3D imaging at up to 201.5 km. It is achieved by using high-efficiency optical devices for collection and detection, and what we believe is a new noise-suppression technique that is efficient for long-range applications. We show that photon-efficient computational algorithms enable accurate 3D imaging over hundreds of kilometers with as few as 0.44 signal photons per pixel. The results represent a significant step toward practical, low-power lidar over extra-long ranges.

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Zheng-Ping Li, Jun-Tian Ye, Xin Huang, Peng-Yu Jiang, Yuan Cao, Yu Hong, Chao Yu, Jun Zhang, Qiang Zhang, Cheng-Zhi Peng, Feihu Xu, Jian-Wei Pan. 2021-03-10. Single-photon imaging over 200 km. https://doi.org/10.1364/optica.408657

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