Quantum illumination with classical correlated light

В. Н. Горбачев, A. A. Rodichkina, Andrew I. Trubilko

Thomas Gregory, Paul‐Antoine Moreau, Ermes Toninelli +1 more

Quantum imaging utilises the quantum states of light to surpass the classical limits of imaging. However, in the real-world quantum imaging schemes are subject to environmental noise and losses that destroy entanglement. Quantum illumination protocols use the spatial correlations between entangled photon-pairs to enable performance enhancements despite the presence of environmental noise and losses. We demonstrate the implementation of such a protocol whose ability to distinguish a quantum signal from environmental noise improves relative to the corresponding direct imaging case as the levels of noise and loss increase. Such quantum illumination protocols should find applications in low-light imaging and quantum LIDAR schemes.

Augusto Garuccio

Lifei Li, Yan Kang, Biao Wang +2 more

We report the quantum-enhanced metal target detection based on quantum illumination, and experimentally verified that quantum illumination still helps low-reflectivity target detection in photon loss scenarios. The results show that the signal-to-noise ratio and target recognition ability of the quantum detection system are more than 10 times stronger than those of the classical detection under the same thermal noise conditions. We believe that the photon-counting based QI protocol, for its robustness to noise and losses, has a huge potentiality to promote the usage of quantum correlated light in real environments.

Richard Murchie, Jonathan Pritchard, John Jeffers

Use of non-classical light in a quantum illumination scheme provides an advantage over classical illumination when used for LIDAR with a simple and realistic detection scheme based on Geiger-mode single photon detectors. Here we provide an analysis that accounts for the additional information gained when detectors do not fire that is typically neglected and show an improvement in performance of quantum illumination. Moreover, we provide a theoretical framework quantifying performance of both quantum and classical illumination for simple target detection, showing parameters for which a quantum advantage exists. Knowledge of the regimes that demonstrate a quantum advantage will inform where possible practical quantum LIDAR utilising non-classical light could be realised.

Ryo Okamoto, Shigeki Takeuchi