Ghost imaging with zero photons

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 9 Apr 2026] Ghost imaging with zero photons Meixue Chen, Yiqi Song, Yu Gu, Huafan Zhang, Huaibin Zheng, Yuchen He, Hui Chen, Yu Zhou, Fuli Li, Zhuo Xu, Jianbin Liu Ghost imaging was first demonstrated with entangled photon pairs and well-known for its peculiar properties. The signal beam that illuminates the object possesses no spatial resolution, whereas the reference beam, which never interacts with the object, is spatially resolved. Either beam alone cannot retrieve the image, which can only be obtained when the signal and reference beams are correlated. Here we will report a ghost imaging experiment with even more peculiar properties, in which the image can be reconstructed when no photon interacts with the object or even no photon in neither signal nor reference beam. All the photons interacted with the object are discarded. Only the time bins with zero photon are employed to retrieve the image, a process referred to as "ghost imaging with zero photons" hereafter. The reason why ghost image can be retrieved with zero photons is jointly determined by photon-number projection measurement and photon statistics of thermal light. The results are helpful to resolve the debate on the physics of ghost imaging and understand the relation between quantum and classical correlations. Comments: 6 pages, 6 figures Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Optics (physics.optics) Cite as: arXiv:2604.07782 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.07782v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.07782 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jianbin Liu [view email] [v1] Thu, 9 Apr 2026 04:17:35 UTC (8,468 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: physics physics.optics References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)