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The inverse gravimetric problem in gravity modelling

One of the main purposes of geodesy is to determine the gravity field of the Earth in the space outside its physical surface. This purpose can be pursued without any particular knowledge of the internal density even if the exact shape of the physical surface of the Earth is not known, though this seems to entangle the two domains, as it was in the old Stoke's theory before the appearance of Molodensky's approach. Nevertheless, even when large, dense and homogeneous data sets are available, it was always recognized that subtracting from the gravity field the effect of the outer layer of the masses (topographic effect) yields a much smoother field. This is obviously more important when a sparse data set is bad so that any smoothing of the gravity field helps in interpolating between the data without raising the modeling error, this approach is generally followed because it has become very cheap in terms of computing time since the appearance of spectral techniques. The mathematical description of the Inverse Gravimetric Problem (IGP) is dominated mainly by two principles, which in loose terms can be formulated as follows: the knowledge of the external gravity field determines mainly the lateral variations of the density; and the deeper the density anomaly giving rise to a gravity anomaly, the more improperly posed is the problem of recovering the former from the latter. The statistical relation between rho and n (and its inverse) is also investigated in its general form, proving that degree cross-covariances have to be introduced to describe the behavior of rho. The problem of the simultaneous estimate of a spherical anomalous potential and of the external, topographic masses is addressed criticizing the choice of the mixed collection approach.

Sanso, F.↗

Phase-Sensitive Coherence and the Classical-Quantum Boundary in Ghost Imaging

The theory of partial coherence has a long and storied history in classical statistical optics. the vast majority of this work addresses fields that are statistically stationary in time, hence their complex envelopes only have phase-insensitive correlations. The quantum optics of squeezed-state generation, however, depends on nonlinear interactions producing baseband field operators with phase-insensitive and phase-sensitive correlations. Utilizing quantum light to enhance imaging has been a topic of considerable current interest, much of it involving biphotons, i.e., streams of entangled-photon pairs. Biphotons have been employed for quantum versions of optical coherence tomography, ghost imaging, holography, and lithography. However, their seemingly quantum features have been mimicked with classical-sate light, questioning wherein lies the classical-quantum boundary. We have shown, for the case of Gaussian-state light, that this boundary is intimately connected to the theory of phase-sensitive partial coherence. Here we present that theory, contrasting it with the familiar case of phase-insensitive partial coherence, and use it to elucidate the classical-quantum boundary of ghost imaging. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that classical phase-sensitive light produces ghost imaging most closely mimicking those obtained in biphotons, and we derived the spatial resolution, image contrast, and signal-to-noise ratio of a standoff-sensing ghost imager, taking into account target-induced speckle.

coherence theory↗

Violations of a new inequality for classical fields

Two entangled photons incident upon two distant interferometers can give a coincidence counting rate that depends nonlocally on the sum of the phases of the two interferometers. It has recently been shown that experiments of this kind may violate a simple inequality that must be satisfied by any classical or semi-classical field theory. The inequality provides a graphic illustration of the lack of objective realism of the electric field. The results of a recent experiment which violates this inequality and in which the optical path length between the two interferometers was greater than 100 m are briefly described.

Franson, J. D.↗

Space QUEST Mission Proposal: Experimentally Testing Decoherence Due to Gravity

Models of quantum systems on curved space-times lack sufficient experimental verification. Some speculative theories suggest that quantum properties, such as entanglement, may exhibit entirely different behavior to purely classical systems. By measuring this effect or lack thereof, we can test the hypotheses behind several such models. For instance, as predicted by Ralph and coworkers [T C Ralph, G J Milburn, and T Downes, Phys. Rev. A, 79(2):22121, 2009; T C Ralph and J Pienaar, New Journal of Physics, 16(8):85008, 2014], a bipartite entangled system could decohere if each particle traversed through a different gravitational field gradient. We propose to study this effect in a ground to space uplink scenario. We extend the above theoretical predictions of Ralph and coworkers and discuss the scientific consequences of detecting/failing to detect the predicted gravitational decoherence. We present a detailed mission design of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Space QUEST (Space - Quantum Entanglement Space Test) mission, and study the feasibility of the mission schema.

Entanglement↗