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arXiv:2007.11109 · IEEE Transactions on Communications

Optimally Displaced Threshold Detection for Discriminating Binary Coherent States Using Imperfect Devices

Renzhi Yuan, Mufei Zhao, Shuai Han, Julian Cheng

Published Dec 31, 2020• 18 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Because of the potential applications in quantum information processing tasks, discrimination of binary coherent states using generalized Kennedy receiver with maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detection has attracted increasing attentions in recent years. In this paper, we analytically study the performance of the generalized Kennedy receiver having optimally displaced threshold detection (ODTD) in a realistic situation with noises and imperfect devices. We first prove that the MAP detection for a generalized Kennedy receiver is equivalent to a threshold detection in this realistic situation. Then we analyze the properties of the optimum threshold and the optimum displacement for ODTD, and propose a heuristic greedy search algorithm to design these parameters. We prove that the ODTD asymptotically approaches the Kennedy receiver with threshold detection when the signal power is large, and we also clarify the connection between the generalized Kennedy receiver with threshold detection and the one-port homodyne detection. Numerical results show that the proposed heuristic greedy search algorithm can obtain a lower and smoother error probability than the existing methods.

DOI
10.1109/tcomm.2020.3048341

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Because of the potential applications in quantum information processing tasks, discrimination of binary coherent states using generalized Kennedy receiver with maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detection has attracted increasing attentions in recent years. In this paper, we analytically study the performance of the generalized Kennedy receiver having optimally displaced threshold detection (ODTD) in a realistic situation with noises and imperfect devices. We first prove that the MAP detection for a generalized Kennedy receiver is equivalent to a threshold detection in this realistic situation. Then we analyze the properties of the optimum threshold and the optimum displacement for ODTD, and propose a heuristic greedy search algorithm to design these parameters. We prove that the ODTD asymptotically approaches the Kennedy receiver with threshold detection when the signal power is large, and we also clarify the connection between the generalized Kennedy receiver with threshold detection and the one-port homodyne detection. Numerical results show that the proposed heuristic greedy search algorithm can obtain a lower and smoother error probability than the existing methods.
In this paper, the performance of optimally displaced threshold detection (ODTD) for discriminating ternary coherent signals is theoretically investigated. We first establish the receiver model for ternary phase shift keying optical quantum communication system using Kennedy receiver with ODTD in a realistic situation. Then we analytically study the error probability for ODTD and formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize this error probability of detection, which is a challenging mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem due to the discreteness of the detection threshold. We then propose an efficient algorithm to tackle this MIP problem and design the displacement and the threshold on both detection branches. We also discuss the receiving scheme using ODTD in the case of unequal prior probabilities and optimize the signal power distribution between the two branches. Numerical results show that for the discrimination of ternary coherent signals using Kennedy-type receiver, ODTD can mitigate the influence of thermal noise and dark count noise and is robust to imperfect quantum efficiency. Besides, we find that the error probability performance can be improved by optimizing the decoding order of the ternary signals and the reflectance of the beam splitter.
The performance of Kennedy receiver with threshold detection is analyzed in the presence of thermal noise. A lower bound is first derived for the error probability of the Kennedy receiver in the presence of thermal noise and it is shown that the performance of the Kennedy receiver is greatly affected by the thermal noise. Then we analyze the performance of the Kennedy receiver using the maximum a posteriori detection, which is proven to be equivalent to a threshold detection. We also optimize the displacement operation to improve further the receiver performance. Numerical results show that the Kennedy receiver with threshold detection can surpass the standard quantum limit achieved by homodyne detection when the average number of thermal photons is smaller than 0.1. The Kennedy receiver with threshold detection using optimized displacement can surpass the standard quantum limit when the average number of thermal photons is smaller than 0.2.
We propose an inverse-squeezing Kennedy receiver for discriminating binary phase-shift-keyed displaced squeezed vacuum states. The receiver combines a Kennedy-type nulling displacement, an orthogonally oriented inverse-squeezing operation and photon-number-resolving detection with a maximum-a-\emph{posteriori} threshold rule. Its key mechanism is that the inverse-squeezing stage converts transmitter-side squeezing into enhanced photon-number contrast, or equivalently an effective coherent-state energy gain, that can be directly exploited at the measurement stage. Under ideal equal-prior conditions, the receiver surpasses the standard quantum limit for squeezed-state binary phase-shift keying at approximately N≈0.3N\approx 0.3N≈0.3, outperforms the Helstrom bound of coherent-state binary phase-shift keying at approximately N≈0.4N\approx 0.4N≈0.4, and reaches the 1\% error level near N≈0.6N\approx 0.6N≈0.6. We further analyze its performance under realistic imperfections, including finite detector efficiency, dark counts, channel phase diffusion, receiver thermal noise and transmission loss. The results show that adaptive thresholding preserves robust performance against detector and noise imperfections over practical parameter ranges, whereas transmission loss progressively suppresses the squeezing-enabled advantage. These findings indicate that, for the fixed source parametrization adopted in this work, the proposed receiver is most advantageous in the low-loss regime, especially at low source energies.
Near-optimal binary coherent state discrimination can be achieved by performing a displacement operation followed by photon detection. This displacement serves as a control parameter that can be tuned to optimize a chosen figure of merit, which makes such receivers attractive beyond state discrimination. Here, we turn this discrimination strategy into a complete continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) protocol based on a binary alphabet of noisy coherent states (displaced thermal states) and displacement receivers. We develop a strategy for estimating the channel parameters with the same displacement receiver, since standard quadrature-based methods do not apply. While a key map can be obtained with on/off detection, we demonstrate that reliable parameter estimation requires photon-number-resolving detection with sufficient resolution. Finite detector resolution underestimates the observed noise and constitutes a potential security loophole, which we quantify and show to be mitigable with modest resolution. We analyze the protocol's security against entangling-cloner collective attacks in the asymptotic regime, for both direct and reverse reconciliation, and show that it can generate secret keys even under noisy state preparation and imperfect detection. Interestingly, we find that the displacement that minimizes the discrimination error probability also performs well for key generation, thus providing a useful and analytically tractable tuning strategy for the CV-QKD receiver. We evaluate the protocol's performance over a range of transmittances and noise parameters, showing that the displacement receiver can outperform conventional homodyne detection in experimentally relevant regimes. Together, our results point to displacement receivers as a promising alternative for CV-QKD implementations.
The quantum discrimination of two non-coherent states draws much attention recently. In this letter, we first consider the quantum discrimination of two noiseless displaced number states. Then we derive the Fock representation of noisy displaced number states and address the problem of discriminating between two noisy displaced number states. We further prove that the optimal quantum discrimination of two noisy displaced number states can be achieved by the Kennedy receiver with threshold detection. Simulation results verify the theoretical derivations and show that the error probability of on-off keying modulation using a displaced number state is significantly less than that of on-off keying modulation using a coherent state with the same average energy.
We propose a near-optimum receiver for the discrimination of binary phase-shift-keyed coherent states employing photon-number-resolving detectors. The receiver exploits a discrimination strategy based on both so-called homodyne-like and direct detection, thus resulting in a hybrid scheme. We analyze the performance and robustness of the proposed scheme under realistic conditions, namely, in the presence of inefficient detection and dark counts. We show that the present hybrid setup is near- optimum and beats both the standard quantum limit and the performance of the Kennedy receiver.