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Proceedings of the IEEE

Information transmission with photon-number-squeezed light

Bahaa E. A. Saleh, Malvin Carl Teich

Published Mar 1, 1992• 19 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Several methods have been proposed for the generation of photon-number-squeezed (sub-Poisson) light by imparting to the photon stream and anticorrelation that regularizes the times of arrival of the photons. This is accomplished by means of control of the excitation or emission process or by feedback, using a copy of the photon point processes when the emissions occur in parts. Possible advantages of communication by photon-number-squeezed light are discussed. For receivers in which the photon arrival times are observed, the channel capacity cannot be improved by modifying an initially Poisson photon stream and making it sub-Poisson. For photon-counting receivers, however, improvement of the channel capacity is possible. The bit-error-rate of an on-off keying communication system using sub-Poisson photons created by introducing anticorrelation into an initially Poisson beam may or may not be smaller than the error rates of the Poisson channel, depending on where the maximum power constraint is placed.>

DOI
10.1109/5.135360

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Numerous schemes have been recently suggested for generating photon-number-squeezed light. In one class of technique, initially Poisson photons are modified (using methods such as deadtime deletion, decimation, coincidence decimation, and overflow count deletion) to yield sub-Poisson photons. In another class, feedback is applied (e.g., by control of the rate of generation of photoevents) so that the resultant point process is self-exciting instead of Poisson. Are such light sources useful for optical communication? Can the channel capacity C of a lightwave communication system based on photoevent point process observations be increased by use of photon-number-squeezed light?

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Several methods have been proposed for the generation of photon-number-squeezed (sub-Poisson) light by imparting to the photon stream and anticorrelation that regularizes the times of arrival of the photons. This is accomplished by means of control of the excitation or emission process or by feedback, using a copy of the photon point processes when the emissions occur in parts. Possible advantages of communication by photon-number-squeezed light are discussed. For receivers in which the photon arrival times are observed, the channel capacity cannot be improved by modifying an initially Poisson photon stream and making it sub-Poisson. For photon-counting receivers, however, improvement of the channel capacity is possible. The bit-error-rate of an on-off keying communication system using sub-Poisson photons created by introducing anticorrelation into an initially Poisson beam may or may not be smaller than the error rates of the Poisson channel, depending on where the maximum power constraint is placed.>
Numerous schemes have been recently suggested for generating photon-number-squeezed light. In one class of technique, initially Poisson photons are modified (using methods such as deadtime deletion, decimation, coincidence decimation, and overflow count deletion) to yield sub-Poisson photons. In another class, feedback is applied (e.g., by control of the rate of generation of photoevents) so that the resultant point process is self-exciting instead of Poisson. Are such light sources useful for optical communication? Can the channel capacity C of a lightwave communication system based on photoevent point process observations be increased by use of photon-number-squeezed light?
The channel capacity C of a light-wave communication system based on photoevent point process observations cannot be increased by use of photon-number--squeezed light. Under a constraint of maximum photon rate ${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{\mathrm{max}}$, the channel capacity C=${\ensuremath{\lambda}}_{\mathrm{max}/\mathrm{e}}$ is achieved with a Poisson process. On the other hand, the channel capacity of a communication system based on photon counting can be increased by use of photon-number--squeezed light. The improvement vanishes in the limit of very small mean counts.
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.>
The accuracy of optical measurements at low light levels is limited by the quantum noise of the source and by the random nature of the interaction with the measured object. The source noise may be reduced by use of nonclassical photon-number squeezed light. We consider the use of two photon-correlated beams (generated, for example, by spontaneous parametric downconversion) to measure the optical transmittance of an object. The photons of each beam obey a random Poisson process but are synchronized in time. One beam is used to probe the object, and the other is used as a reference providing information on the realization of the random arrival of photons at the object. The additional information available by such measurement may be exploited to improve the accuracy of the measurement. Various estimators, including the maximum-likelihood estimator, are considered, and their performance is evaluated and compared with the measurement based on a single-beam conventional (Poissonian) source and a maximally squeezed (fixed-photon-number) source. The performance advantage that is established depends on parameters such as the intensity of the source, the transmittance of the object, the quantum efficiency of the detectors, the background noise, and the degree of correlation of the photon numbers in the two beams.
The generation of nonclassical light has recently received a great deal of attention because three forms of it have now been observed in the laboratory: antibunched light, photon-number-squeezed (or sub-Poisson) light, and quadrature-squeezed light. These characteristics may, but need not, accompany each other in any given light source. Nonclassical light has been produced in experiments using resonance fluorescence, the Franck-Hertz effect, parametric interact ions, and semiconductor light sources. It is likely to be useful in providing new insights in various physical and biological processes, and in applications such as lightwave communications. Some of the characteristics, methods of generation, and expected uses of squeezed light will be addressed.