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Frontiers in Optics

Demonstration of the Generalized-Kennedy Receiver for Quantum-Limited Discrimination of Photon-Starved Classical Light

Samuel Gartenstein, Jonathan L. Habif, Arun Jagannathan

Published Jan 1, 2019• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present an experimental implementation of a generalized Kennedy receiver and demonstrate its capability to approach the quantum sensitivity limit for discrimination between coherent and thermal radiation at photon-starved intensities.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2019.jtu3a.112

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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.
Quantum communication allows for deep space communication and secure transmission of information. The perfomance and security of such protocols is based on the non-orthogonality of the used states, which is a key feature of quantum mechanics. The task of a quantum receiver is to discriminate between different states in a given alphabet with minimum error. This gives rise to the necessity of having receivers with a minimum amount of discrimination errors approaching the limits imposed by quantum mechanics [1,2]. Conventional detection schemes fail to fulfill this task, which makes the study of quantum receivers an important field in the realm of quantum communication.