Ghost imaging was first demonstrated with entangled photon pairs and is 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 reconstruct the image, which can only be obtained when the signal and reference beams are correlated. Here, we report a thermal light ghost imaging experiment with even more peculiar properties, in which the image is reconstructed via the correlation of time bins containing zero photons, a process referred to as “ghost imaging with zero photons” hereafter. All the photons that have interacted with the object are discarded. The reason why the ghost image can be reconstructed with zero photons is attributed to the photon-number projection measurement and the photon statistics of thermal light. The information about the object is contained not only in the detected photons, but also in the zero photons. The results are helpful in resolving the debate on the physics of ghost imaging and understanding the relation between quantum and classical correlations.

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• Optical coherence
• Quantum optics