Title: "Quantum limits to the resolution of spontaneous emission lifetimes"
Speaker: Mikael Backlund, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.
In this talk, Dr. Backlund will present his lab's work establishing the quantum information theoretical limits to several tasks related to lifetime estimation and discrimination of a two-level spontaneous optical emitter. Focusing in particular, on the model problem of resolving two mutually incoherent exponential decays with highly overlapping temporal probability profiles. Mirroring recent studies on quantum-inspired super-resolution of point emitters, we find that direct lifetime measurement suffers from an analog of “Rayleigh's curse” when the time constants of the two decay channels approach one another. Dr. Backlund proposes alternative measurement schemes that circumvent this limit and demonstrate superiority to direct measurement for a related binary hypothesis test. He will also present new results that explore relaxed assumptions on the spectral purity of the emitted photons, as well as the relative efficiency of one- vs. two-photon measurement schemes.
