Coherent lightwave communications systems are approaching a limit where the error rates and channel capacities are limited by the quantum properties of light. This is often referred to as the shot-noise limit. If ideal laser light is used in the system, there is no way to avoid this limit. However, new states of the light field called squeezed states have recently been developed that allow an improvement in error rates below the shot-noise limit. Squeezed light concepts and recent experiments are reviewed with emphasis on aspects important to coherent communications. It is shown that channel capacity can be improved using squeezed light by only a factor of two. Larger improvements are in principle possible for error rates, e.g. a factor of three reduction in the number of required photons per bit for a 10/sup -9/ bit error rate. An example of a recent high-performance system is described where optical losses and electronic noise reduce the improvement expected using squeezed light to the 10-20% level. It is concluded that squeezed light only offers significant improvement in bit error rates for very-high-efficiency systems.>
Abstract The communication of information by means of laser is an important technique. Therefore, it is necessary to construct a communication theory (quantum information theory) including quantum effects of laser action. Ohya, one of the authors, has studied the quantum communication channel and constructed a compound state for systematic formulation of the mutual information in quantum systems. In this paper, (1) we briefly review the mathematical formulation of quantum communication theory and (2) construct a physical model of the optical fiber communication process in order to examine the qualitative properties of the communication channel.
An important problem in quantum information theory is finding the best possible performance of the optical communication channel employing suitable codewords, receiver design, and constellation optimization techniques. Many receiver designs have been studied in the past to discriminate Phase-Shift Keying (PSK) quantum states that are used to encode information before transmitting over the communication channel. Among many types of quantum states, there has been significant work on the use of coherent states for encoding information. Previous work has sought to improve the communication performance in terms of various metrics such as error probability of state discrimination and capacities by employing a number of quantum states such as coherent states and squeezed-displaced states. In this thesis, we provide optimal receiver design employing coherent states and squeezed-displaced states to maximize the mutual information and lower the error probability of state discrimination. In the case of pure coherent states, we derive an alternative channel capacity of phase-shift keying coherent state with a realizable displacement receiver by maximizing mutual information over symbol priors and pre-detection displacement. We find that the capacity is higher than the capacity achieved by maximizing mutual information over symbol prior but with zero displacements. The overall scheme demonstrates designing an improved, yet easy-to-implement receiver for better communication performance by tuning it at different photon number regime. We also explore the use of squeezing operations with a displacement receiver for state discrimination. Our calculation demonstrates that we see no performance improvement in terms of the probability of error of state discrimination or mutual information using displacement receivers when optimal squeezing on the transmitter side is used. In addition, we also study the receiver design scheme for QPSK modulation where squeezing is employed at the receiver side. We find that using the squeezing operation on the receiver side provides an advantage in terms of increased mutual information for the low-photon number regime compared to when no squeezing is used. In the later part of the thesis, we study entanglement-assisted communication using two-mode squeezing vacuum. The use of pre-shared entanglement in entanglement-assisted communication provides a superior alternative to classical communication specifically in the low brightness regime and highly noisy environment. In this thesis, we analyze the performance of a few low-complexity receivers that employ optical parametric amplifiers. In the simulation, we demonstrate that receiver designs with an entanglement-assisted scheme using phase-shift-keying modulation can outperform classical capacities. We describe a newly proposed 2x2 optical hybrid receiver for entanglement-assisted communication whose performance is roughly 10% better in terms of error probability as compared to previously proposed optical parametric amplifier-based receivers. Further, we find that using unequal priors for BPSK provides approximately three times the advantage over equal priors in terms of information rate.
Quantum mutual entropy and quantum capacity are rigorously defined by Ohya, and they are quite useful in the study of quantum communication processes [4, 7, 8, 9,10]. Mathematical models of optical communication processes are described by a quantum channel and optical states, and quantum capacity is one of the most important criteria to measure the efficiency of information transmission [4,7,8]. In actual optical communication, a laser beam is used for a signal, and it is denoted mathematically by a coherent state. Further, optical communication using a squeezed state, which is expected to be more efficient than that using a coherent state is proposed. In this paper, we define several quantum channels, that is, a squeezed channel and a coherent channel and so on. We compare them by calculating quantum capacity.