Abstract

The quantum analogue of ptychography, a powerful coherent diffractive imaging technique, is a simple method for reconstructing d-dimensional pure states. It relies on measuring partially overlapping parts of the input state in a single orthonormal basis and feeding the outcomes to an iterative phase retrieval algorithm for postprocessing. We provide a proof of concept demonstration of this method by determining pure states given by superpositions of d transverse spatial modes of an optical field. A set of n rank-r projectors, diagonal in the spatial mode basis, is used to generate n partially overlapping parts of the input, and each part is projectively measured in the Fourier transformed basis. For d up to 32, we successfully reconstructed hundreds of random states using n = 5 and n = d rank-dd/2e projectors. The extension of quantum ptychography for other types of photonic spatial modes is outlined.