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JOURNAL OF SHENZHEN UNIVERSITY SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

The enhancement of optical coherent detection by amplitude estimation

Hui Wang

Published Jan 1, 2011• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

In optical coherent communication systems,balanced photodetectors were typically employed.Such photodetectors preserved the product of the received optical signals and the local oscillators(LO) for detection but cancelled out the power of both.A new detection scheme which aims to maintain the full information obtained from the photodetectors was proposed.Not only the product of the signals and the LO but also the power of signals were used to estimate the amplitude of the target signals.For 16-qudrature-amplitude-modulation(16-QAM) and 64-QAM signals,the simulation results show that the new scheme can outperform the conventional balanced detection method by more than 1 dB in SNR.

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In optical coherent communication systems,balanced photodetectors were typically employed.Such photodetectors preserved the product of the received optical signals and the local oscillators(LO) for detection but cancelled out the power of both.A new detection scheme which aims to maintain the full information obtained from the photodetectors was proposed.Not only the product of the signals and the LO but also the power of signals were used to estimate the amplitude of the target signals.For 16-qudrature-amplitude-modulation(16-QAM) and 64-QAM signals,the simulation results show that the new scheme can outperform the conventional balanced detection method by more than 1 dB in SNR.
A proposed method of suppressing the effect of background noise in an optical communication system would exploit the transmission and reception of correlated photons at the receiver. The method would not afford any advantage in a system in which performance is limited by shot noise. However, if the performance of the system is limited by background noise (e.g., sunlight in the case of a free-space optical communication system or incoherently scattered in-band photons in the case of a fiber-optic communication system), then the proposed method could offer an advantage: the proposed method would make it possible to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) significantly greater than that of an otherwise equivalent background- noise-limited optical communication system based on the classical transmission and reception of uncorrelated photons. The figure schematically depicts a classical optical-communication system and a system according to the proposed method. In the classical system, a modulated laser beam is transmitted along an optical path to a receiver, the optics of which include a narrow-band-pass filter that suppresses some of the background noise. A photodetector in the receiver detects the laser-beam and background photons, most or all of which are uncorrelated. In the proposed system, correlated photons would be generated at the transmitter by making a modulated laser beam pass through a nonlinear parametric down-conversion crystal. The sum of frequencies of the correlated photons in each pair would equal the frequency of the incident photon from which they were generated. As in the classical system, the correlated photons would travel along an optical path to a receiver, where they would be band-pass filtered and detected. Unlike in the classical system, the photodetector in the receiver in this system would be one that intrinsically favors the detection of pairs of correlated photons over the detection of uncorrelated photons. Even though there would be no way of knowing the precise location and time of creation of a given pair of correlated signal photons in the nonlinear down-conversion crystal, the fact that the photons are necessarily created at the same time and place makes it possible to utilize conventional geometrical imaging optics to reunite the photons in coincidence in the receiving photodetector. Because most or all of the signal photons would be correlated while most or all of the noise photons would be uncorrelated, the S/N would be correspondingly enhanced in the photodetector output. An additional advantage to be gained by use of a correlated-photon detector is that it could be capable of recovering the signal even in the presence of background light so bright that a classical uncorrelated-photon detector would be saturated. A blocked-impurity-band (BIB) photodetector that preferentially detects pairs of correlated photons over uncorrelated ones and that operates at a quantum efficiency of 88 percent is commercially available. This detector must be cooled to the temperature of liquid helium to obtain the desired low-noise performance. It is planned to use this detector in a proof-of-principle demonstration. In addition, it may be possible to develop GaN-based photodetectors that could offer the desired low-noise performance at room temperature.
We present an application of coherent homodyne detection to the problem of low photon number communications and cryptography. As the coherent demodulation of an optical field requires the measurement of its (non commutating) inphase and quadrature components, we present the structure and operation of an 8-port optical hybrid comprising 2 balanced homodyne detection structures, for the simultaneous measurement of the 2 quadratures. We analyze this receiver operating with a strong local oscillator field, when the received field is in weak coherent states, with digital phase modulation: we obtain the homodyne statistics and the uncertainty product in the presence of vacuum noises from the input signal port and unused ports and discuss the increase in uncertainty due to the simultaneous measurements of the quadratures. We obtain the signal to noise ratio as well of the bit error rate performance for binary phase shift keying and discuss the departure from the standard quantum limit.
This paper presents a practical optical communication framework that transmits binary information using distinct coherent states characterized by different mean photon numbers and detects the received signals via threshold-based photon counting. Unlike conventional approaches that often assume idealized detection environments, we rigorously analyze the performance of the proposed scheme under three realistic scenarios: (i) noise-free channels, (ii) channels impaired by additive Poisson noise, and (iii) turbulent free-space optical channels with fading and background noise. The coherent-state modulation enables energy-efficient transmission in the quantum-limited regime while the photon-counting receiver employs a statistically optimized decision threshold to discriminate between received photon-count levels. To address the lack of instantaneous channel state information in fading environments, we further propose a pilot-based channel estimation method that enables adaptive threshold selection. Closed-form expressions for decision thresholds and error probabilities are derived, and the effectiveness of the scheme is validated through detailed numerical simulations. These results offer design insights for photon-efficient, low-power optical communication systems operating under realistic physical impairments.
We present a quantum receiver for quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) coherent-state discrimination with the homodyne-displacement hybrid structure. Our strategy is to carry out two successive measurements on parts of the quantum states. The homodyne result of the first measurement reveals partial information about the state and is forwarded to a displacement receiver, which finally identifies the input state by using feedback to adjust a reference field. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation results show that for 16-QAM, the hybrid receiver could outperform the standard quantum limit using only on-off single-photon detectors with a reduced number of signal-state partitions, showing great potential toward implementing the receiver practically.
Recovering complex optical signals with high sensitivity is central to coherent communication and sensing. Beyond conventional homodyne and heterodyne reception, phase-conjugate twin-wave encoding and phase-sensitive joint detection offer an alternative strategy with enhanced sensitivity. Extending this approach to long-distance transmission of high-order-modulated signals is challenging because optical phase coherence must be maintained at the receiver. Here we experimentally demonstrate injection-locking-assisted phase-conjugated twin-wave reception of 200-MBaud signals with modulation formats up to 256-QAM over 100 km of optical fiber. Optical injection locking regenerates the local oscillator (LO) from a reference transmitted through the 16 dB-loss link, while pilot-assisted optical feedback stabilizes the relative signal-LO phase, enabling coherent combining of the phase-conjugated twin waves at a single balanced photodetector. At equal received signal-photon number per quadrature in each data-carrying optical mode, the measured PCTW signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) exceeds the ideal single-mode homodyne standard quantum limit (SQL) benchmark. The SNR gains over the measured homodyne and conventional heterodyne results are about 3 dB and 6 dB, respectively. Constellation and bit-error-rate measurements show that this gain improves high-order data recovery relative to heterodyne reception. An ideal Gaussian-noise model predicts a photon information efficiency of 1.54 bits per received signal photon for uniform 16-QAM. These results establish an injection-locking-assisted coherent receiver architecture that implements joint detection of phase-conjugated twin waves over 100 km of fiber with enhanced sensitivity, providing a practical route for photon-efficient coherent communication.