Quantum illumination versus coherent-state target detection

• Main Authors: Shapiro, Jeffrey H. (Contributor), Lloyd, Seth (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Physics Publishing, 2012-05-04T15:03:33Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 Entanglement is arguably the key quantum-mechanical resource for improving the performance of communication, precision measurement and computing systems beyond their classical-physics limits. Yet entanglement is fragile, being very susceptible to destruction by the decoherence arising from loss and noise. Surprisingly, Lloyd (2008 Science 321 1463) recently proved that a very large performance gain accrues from use of entanglement in single-photon target detection within an entanglement-destroying lossy, noisy environment when compared to what can be achieved with unentangled single-photon states. We extend Lloyd's analysis to the full multiphoton input Hilbert space. We show that the performance of Lloyd's single-photon'quantum illumination' system is, at best, equal to that of a coherent-state transmitter of the same average photon number, and may be substantially worse. We demonstrate that the coherent-state system derives its advantage from the coherence between a sequence of weak-single photon on average-transmissions, a possibility that was not allowed for in Lloyd's work. Nevertheless, as shown by Tan et al (2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 101 253601), quantum illumination may offer a significant, although more modest, performance gain when operation is not limited to the single-photon regime.