Record low error rates in discrimination of ultra-faint coherent states are achieved by exploring photon detection times available in quantum measurements, paving the way to the energy-efficient internet of the future.
The efficient use of communication channels motivates extensive research in novel communication protocols. Modern communication protocols use large alphabets contain up to a few thousand symbols, thus optimizing the use of power and available frequency space. To date, quantum receivers that discriminate up to approximately 20 symbols were theoretically investigated and receivers with as many as 4 nonorthogonal coherent states have been experimentally demonstrated. However, all heretofore explored quantum receivers suffer from the sensitivity degradation with the alphabet size. Particularly, their Helstrom Bound (HB) nearly reaches the classical standard quantum limit (SQL). Here we introduce an M-ary quantum receiver based on a coherent frequency shift keying (CFSK) protocol with a record power sensitivity, free of the above deficiency. The CFSK not only provides better accuracy for longer alphabets but also allows discrimination with a practically attainable symbol error rate (SER) situated much below the HBs of other encodings for large alphabets. Our receiver operates with a classical transmitter, and with any communication channel, including the existing global fiber network. It can be used to increase the amplification-free range in a network and/or reduce power requirements on the transmitter by more than 1000 times. In addition, the quantum measurement advantage can significantly optimize the use of the frequency space in comparison to classical frequency keying protocols. This advantage can be used in deep-space telecom links to enhance the satellite power budget. In existing fiber network links, quantum CFSK receivers can improve the amplification-free range by approximately the factor of 2.
Quantum state discrimination plays a central role in quantum information and communication. For the discrimination of optical quantum states, the two most widely adopted measurement techniques are photon detection, which produces discrete outcomes, and homodyne detection, which produces continuous outcomes. While various protocols using photon detection have been proposed for optimal and near-optimal discrimination between two coherent states, homodyne detection is known to have higher error rates, with its minimum achievable error rate often referred to as the Gaussian limit. In this work, we demonstrate that, despite the fundamental differences between discretely labelled and continuously labelled measurements, continuously labelled non-Gaussian measurements can also achieve near-optimal coherent state discrimination. We design two discrimination protocols that surpass the Gaussian limit: one using non-Gaussian unitary operations with homodyne detection, and another based on orthogonal polynomials. Our results show that photon detection is not required for near-optimal coherent state discrimination and that we can achieve error rates close to the Helstrom bound at low energies with continuously labelled measurements. We also find that our schemes maintain an advantage over the photon detection-based Kennedy receiver for a moderate range of coherent state amplitudes.