Quantum enhanced telescopes beyond the Gottesman protocol

Interferometric techniques have been studied intensively in astronomy since they offer a significant improvement in angular resolution over the direct detection methods. We analyze the entanglement-assisted long-baseline interferometric procedures and investigate potential improvements. Gottesman et al. [1] has shown that one can use the concepts known in quantum information theory in long-baseline interferometry to examine stellar objects given that they are weak thermal sources. Khabiboulline et al. [2] proposed another method based on networks of quantum memories. Here we propose an entanglement-assisted interferometric procedure that can extract more information about the stellar source from each photon it emits when compared to the procedure given in [1]. We also investigate the methods without the burden of the quantum memory implementation requirement.

[1] D. Gottesman et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 070503 (2012)
[2] E. Khabiboulline et al., Phys. Rev. A 100, 022316 (2019)