We study the discrimination of weak coherent states of light with significant overlaps by nondestructive measurements on the light states through measuring atomic states that are entangled to the coherent states via dipole coupling. In this way, the problem of measuring and discriminating coherent light states is shifted to finding the appropriate atom–light interaction and atomic measurements. We show that this scheme allows us to attain a probability of error extremely close to the Helstrom bound, the ultimate quantum limit for discriminating binary quantum states, through the simple Jaynes–Cummings interaction between the field and ancilla with optimized light–atom coupling and projective measurements on the atomic states. Moreover, since the measurement is nondestructive on the light state, information that is not detected by one measurement can be extracted from the post-measurement light states through subsequent measurements.
Nondestructive quantum state discrimination is a fundamental primitive in distributed quantum information processing, where shared multipartite entangled resources need to be identified without being consumed. In this work, we present a scalable ancilla-assisted protocol for the strict nondestructive discrimination of
n-qubit GHZ-class states distributed among distant parties. By employing multipartite GHZ ancillary states and local unitary interactions, we show that the computational-pattern and relative-phase information of the system GHZ state can be coherently mapped onto two ancillary registers while leaving the system state unchanged. We explicitly derive the discrimination rules for three- and four-qubit GHZ-class states and develop a systematic extension to arbitrary
n. We further investigate the discrimination protocol in the presence of depolarizing and amplitude-damping noise in the ancillary system and obtain analytical expressions for the success probability and the corresponding critical noise thresholds. The protocol is also implemented using the IBM Qiskit platform to demonstrate its experimental feasibility and reproduce the expected ancillary measurement signatures. The proposed framework provides a scalable approach to the strict nondestructive discrimination of multipartite GHZ-class states and suggests a broader interpretation of the ancillary GHZ resources as probes of decoherence, opening a possible connection to quantum decoherence sensing in distributed quantum systems.
We study the discrimination of weak coherent states of light with significant overlaps by nondestructive measurements on the light states through measuring atomic states that are entangled to the coherent states via dipole coupling. In this way, the problem of measuring and discriminating coherent light states is shifted to finding the appropriate atom–light interaction and atomic measurements. We show that this scheme allows us to attain a probability of error extremely close to the Helstrom bound, the ultimate quantum limit for discriminating binary quantum states, through the simple Jaynes–Cummings interaction between the field and ancilla with optimized light–atom coupling and projective measurements on the atomic states. Moreover, since the measurement is nondestructive on the light state, information that is not detected by one measurement can be extracted from the post-measurement light states through subsequent measurements.