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IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems

Quantum Cognitive Radar: Adaptive Detection With Entanglement Under Thermal-Loss Channels

Yassir Al-Karawi, Raad S. Alhumaima, Hamed Saffa Al-Raweshidy

Published Jan 1, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An adaptive Quantum-Cognitive Radar (QCR), which incorporates a two-mode squeezed-vacuum (TMSV) transmitter, a joint idler-signal receiver, and a Quantum Neural Network (QNN) controller to optimize parameters in real time, is introduced through this exchange of correspondence. An expression for a Gaussian correlation detector has been found for thermal-loss channels and compared with the quantum Chernoff bound (QCB). Hardware-aware simulations show that QCR achieves higher detection probability$P_{D}$at a fixed false-alarm probability$P_{\text{FA}}$(i.e., the probability of declaring a target when it is absent) than both coherent-state radar and nonadaptive quantum baselines. At$P_{\text{FA}}=0.05$, QCR provides an approximately 3 dB advantage with up to 40% reduction in integration time while maintaining robustness as background noise increases. At the operationally stringent$P_{\text{FA}}=10^{-3}$, QCR achieves$P_{D}=0.47$versus 0.20 for classical radar, corresponding to a 135% relative improvement. The receiver requires only homodyne/heterodyne sampling and digital correlation, making it compatible with noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. The adaptive policy optimizes the parameter vector$(M,N_{S},B,T_{\text{int}},G)$under fixed energy constraints, demonstrating that online adaptation preserves and extends quantum-illumination advantages in nonstationary sensing environments.

DOI
10.1109/taes.2025.3650733

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Microwave quantum illumination (QI) represents a paradigm shift in low-power wireless radar detection, leveraging entanglement between signal and idler microwave photons to achieve detection performance exceeding classical limits by up to 6 dB in error exponent, particularly in high-noise environments where traditional coherent radars falter. This comprehensive survey delineates the theoretical foundations and practical protocols of microwave QI, beginning with two-mode squeezed vacuum state generation using Josephson parametric amplifiers in cryogenic setups, which produce highly correlated photon pairs resilient to channel decoherence. Receiver architectures, including optical parametric amplifier-single-photon avalanche diode (OPA-SPADE) systems with sum-frequency generation for joint measurements and digital phase-conjugation for computational correlation recovery, enable efficient extraction of quantum discord even after significant atmospheric loss or low target reflectivity (under 1%).Performance analyses under realistic thermal noise models ( ) and -loss channels confirm sustained quantum advantages via the quantum Chernoff exponent , validated by ray-tracing simulations showing doubled detection range at fixed power and lab experiments at 10 GHz carriers detecting weak reflectors amid 100 K noise. Low-power optimizations such as adaptive entanglement tuning, chirped pulse shaping, and neural network-aided parameter selection yield 50% energy reductions without sacrificing fidelity, making QI viable for battery-limited platforms. Applications encompass short-range automotive/UAV radar for fog-penetrating obstacle avoidance, non-invasive biomedical subsurface imaging with safe radiation levels, covert perimeter security against jamming, and seamless integration into 6G networks via joint communication-sensing waveforms at mm Wave/THz bands. The paper identifies key challenges including multi-target scalability, real-time gigascale processing, and quantum RF interface standardization, proposing hybrid quantum-classical frameworks and entanglement-swapped sensor arrays as pathways to deployment. This work bridges quantum optics with RF engineering, equipping researchers with blueprints for prototyping transformative quantum-enhanced wireless sensing systems.
Quantum illumination (QI) exploits quantum correlations to detect weakly reflecting targets embedded in noisy environments with higher sensitivity than classical illumination (CI). We investigate the effectiveness of QI in a realistic setting in which the signal sequentially interacts with a noisy environment and a lossy target. The target is considered at a temperature distinct from its surroundings, while both the interactions are modeled as an action of independent beam splitters with different reflectivities. The detection performance is quantified using the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the quantum Chernoff bound (QCB), the latter providing an upper bound on the error probability. The performance of the Gaussian two-mode squeezed state (TMSS) is compared with that of the optimal classical protocol based on coherent states (CS). The proposed model shows that TMSS consistently achieves a higher SNR than CS for a low-reflectivity target and an arbitrary phase change and remains robust against thermal noise. Furthermore, a sufficiently lower QCB is obtained for TMSS than in previously reported results, indicating greater distinguishability between the presence and absence of the target. These findings underscore the role of realistic modeling in improving QI-based detection of lossy targets, with potential relevance to quantum radar and lidar systems.
This report presents a complete analytical and numerical study of microwave quantum illumination (QI) radar. Starting from the covariance-matrix formalism of two-mode squeezed vacuum (TMSV) Gaussian states, we model signal propagation through a thermal-lossy channel representing a low-reflectivity target in a strong thermal background, derive the joint covariance matrices under both hypotheses, and numerically reproduce the well-known 6.02 dB Chernoff-exponent advantage of the quantum-optimal receiver over classical coherent radar.
We compare the performance of a quantum radar based on two-mode squeezed states with a classical radar system based on correlated thermal noise. With a constraint of equal number of photons NStransmitted to probe the environment, we find that the quantum setup exhibits an advantage with respect to its classical counterpart of √2 in the cross-mode correlations. Amplification of the signal and the idler is considered at different stages of the protocol, showing that no quantum advantage is achievable when a large-enough gain is applied, even when quantum-limited amplifiers are available. We also characterize the minimal type-II error probability decay, given a constraint on the type-I error probability, and find that the optimal decay rate of the type-II error probability in the quantum setup is ln(1 + 1/NS) larger than the optimal classical setup, in the NS<; <; 1 regime. In addition, we consider the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves for the scenario when the idler and the received signal are measured separately, showing that no quantum advantage is present in this case. Our work characterizes the trade-off between quantum correlations and noise in quantum radar systems.
Quantum radar is a remote sensing technique for target detection that has extensively been explored in conjunction with entangled two-mode squeezed vacuum states. This work extends the existing protocol to a scheme that utilizes a three-mode squeezed state with genuine tripartite entanglement. The three entangled modes are divided into two signal modes and one idler mode. A numerical evaluation of the Chernoff bound shows that the proposed protocol has the potential to offer a higher quantum advantage in specific parameter regimes.
There has been a great interest in quantum metrology (e.g., quantum interferometric radar) due to its applications in sub-Rayleigh ranging and remote sensing. Despite interferometric radar has received vast amount of attentions over the past two decades, very few researches has been conducted on another type of quantum radar: quantum illumination radar, or more precisely quantum target detection. It is, in general, used to interrogate whether the low-reflectivity target in a noisy thermal bath is existed using quantum light. The entanglement properties of its emitted light source give it a unique detection advantage over the classical radar. Entangled coherent state (ECS), as a class of quantum states with high entanglement robustness in noisy environments, has been widely used in several fields of quantum science such as quantum informatics, quantum metrology . In this paper, we investigate the target detection performance of quantum illumination radar based on three different types of ECS states. We employ the two-mode squeezed vacuum state (TMSV) and the coherent state as benchmarks to compare and analyze the relationship between the entanglement strength of the three types of ECS states and their quantum illumination detection performance. We found that the detection performance of the three ECS states is better than that of the coherent state. However, it is inferior to that of the TMSV state when the target is of low reflectivity. The emitted photon number is much smaller than the background noise (we call this as “good” illumination conditions). On the contrary, quantum illumination radar has no obvious advantage over coherent state radar for target detection under other illumination conditions; further, the detection performance of these three types of ECS states is not evidently related to that of the TMSV state and the coherent state. Finally, we reveal that the target detection performance of quantum illumination for the first two types of ECS states can be determined by their entanglement strength under “good” illumination conditions by adjusting the inter-modal phase of these two ECS states while keeping the emitted photon number constant. Under other illumination conditions, there is no evidence to demonstrate the entanglement strength of ECS states being associated with their target detection performance.