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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Real-time phase-reference monitoring in a quasi-optimal coherent-state receiver

Alessia Allevi, Matteo Bina, Maria Bondani, Stefano Olivares

Published May 7, 2015• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

The Kennedy-like receiver is a quasi-optimal discrimination scheme employed in binary phase-shift-keyed communication schemes with coherent states. In its standard configuration, it is based on the interference of the two signals encoding the message with a reference local oscillator and on the measurement by means of ON/OFF detectors. Here we demonstrate that, without interrupting the communication, it is possible to monitor the relative phase between the signals and the local oscillator by applying a Bayesian processing to the very data sample used to discriminate the signals at any shot. We show, both numerically and experimentally, that the minimum uncertainty in phase estimation can be achieved both with ON/OFF and photon-number resolving detectors. The performances of our phase-estimation method in the presence of either uniform phase noise or phase diffusion are also investigated and discussed.

DOI
10.1117/12.2178937

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The Kennedy-like receiver is a quasi-optimal discrimination scheme employed in binary phase-shift-keyed communication schemes with coherent states. In its standard configuration, it is based on the interference of the two signals encoding the message with a reference local oscillator and on the measurement by means of ON/OFF detectors. Here we demonstrate that, without interrupting the communication, it is possible to monitor the relative phase between the signals and the local oscillator by applying a Bayesian processing to the very data sample used to discriminate the signals at any shot. We show, both numerically and experimentally, that the minimum uncertainty in phase estimation can be achieved both with ON/OFF and photon-number resolving detectors. The performances of our phase-estimation method in the presence of either uniform phase noise or phase diffusion are also investigated and discussed.
The Kennedy-like receiver is a quasi-optimal receiver employed in binary phase-shift-keyed communication schemes with coherent states. It is based on the interference of the two signals encoding the message with a reference local oscillator and on/off photodetection. We show both theoretically and experimentally that it is possible to extract useful information about the phase reference by Bayesian processing of the very same data sample used to discriminate the signals shot by shot. We demonstrate that the minimum uncertainty in phase estimation, given by the inverse of the Fisher information associated with the statistics of the collected data, can be achieved. We also numerically and experimentally investigate the performances of our phase-estimation method in the presence of phase noise, when either on/off or photon-number resolving detectors are employed.
Phase estimation represents a crucial challenge in many fields of Physics, ranging from Quantum Metrology to Quantum Information Processing. This task is usually pursued by means of interferometric schemes, in which the choice of the input states and of the detection apparatus is aimed at minimizing the uncertainty in the estimation of the relative phase between the inputs. State discrimination protocols in communication channels with coherent states also require the monitoring of the optical phase. Therefore, the problem of phase estimation is relevant to face the issue of coherent states discrimination. Here we consider a quasi-optimal Kennedy-like receiver, based on the interference of two coherent signals, to be discriminated, with a reference local oscillator. By means of the Bayesian processing of a small amount of data drawn from the outputs of the shot-by-shot discrimination protocol, we demonstrate the achievement of the minimum uncertainty in phase estimation, also in the presence of uniform phase noise. Moreover, we show that the use of photon-number resolving detectors in the receiver improves the phase-estimation strategy, especially with respect to the usually employed on/off detectors. From the experimental point of view, this comparison is realized by employing hybrid photodetectors.
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.
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.
Employing quantum receivers to discriminate laser coherent states makes it feasible to achieve error probabilities below the standard quantum limit (SQL), particularly for photon-starved optical communication. However, the quantum receiver performance for phase shift keyed coherent states is severely degraded by random phase and intensity noise in realistic communication channels. This paper proposes a phase and intensity noise-tracking method based on the cubature Kalman filter (CKF) to improve the performance of time-resolving quantum receivers. The filter leverages the data collected during time-resolving state discrimination to perform real-time estimation and correction of time-varying phase and intensity noise. By conducting numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed noise-tracking method enables the time-resolving quantum receiver to retain its superiority over the SQL while requiring significantly less computational effort than a Bayesian estimator. Additionally, the robustness against practical imperfections, including dead time and dark count rate of single photon detector (SPD), is shown through the simulations.
We experimentally demonstrate a quantum receiver based on the Kennedy scheme for discrimination between two phase-modulated weak coherent states. The receiver is assembled entirely from standard fiber-optic elements and operates at a conventional telecom wavelength of 1.55 $\ensuremath{\mu}\text{m}$. The local oscillator and the signal are transmitted through different optical fibers, and the displaced signal is measured with a high-efficiency superconducting nanowire single-photon detector. We show the discrimination error rate is two times below that of a shot-noise-limited receiver with the same system detection efficiency.