Quantum receiver for quadrature phase-shift keying at the single photon level
Jasminder S. Sidhu, Shuro Izumi, Jonas Schou Neergaard-Nielsen, Cosmo Lupo, Ulrik L. Andersen
Abstract
Quantum enhanced receivers are endowed with resources to achieve higher sensitivities than conventional technologies. For application in optical communications, they provide improved discriminatory capabilities for multiple non-orthogonal quantum states. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a new decoding scheme for quadrature phase-shift encoded signals. Our receiver surpasses the standard quantum limit and outperforms all previously known non-adaptive detectors at low input powers. Unlike existing approaches, our receiver only exploits auxiliary coherent-state fields, linear optics, and on-off photo-detection. This circumvents the requirement for challenging feed-forward operations that limit communication transmission rates and can be readily implemented with current technology.