Temporal ghost imaging with classical non-stationary pulsed light

Abstract

Temporal ghost imaging with classical pulses is described as a temporal counterpart of conventional ghost imaging with thermal light. A temporal object to be imaged is located in the test arm, while the reference arm consists of some simple temporal optical elements. It is shown by illustrative examples that, when a certain condition is satisfied, the correlation between intensity fluctuations in these two arms gives basically the squared modulus of the object, but it is generally distorted by the effect of the incident pulse. The resultant temporal image depends only on the single temporal variable in the reference arm, although the light in this arm never interacts with the object. Potential applications of this system are briefly discussed.