Brighter images with no added noise

摘要

Anyone who has adjusted the sensitivity settings of a camera in weak light will have noticed that increasing the electronic gain of the camera's light sensor yields images of poor quality. This observation reveals a general property of amplification of signals: it is accompanied by noise. However, there are special conditions in which such noise can be circumvented. Writing in Physical Review Letters, Corzo et al.' describe how they have achieved this in the amplification of faint images.