Hyperentanglement-enhanced quantum illumination

Abstract

In quantum illumination, the signal mode of light, entangled with an idler mode, is dispatched towards a suspected object bathed in thermal noise and the returning mode, along with the stored idler mode, is measured to determine the presence or absence of the object. In this process, entanglement is destroyed but its benefits in the form of classical correlations and enlarged Hilbert space survive. Here, we propose the use of probe state hyperentangled in two degrees of freedom - polarization and frequency, to achieve a significant 12dB performance improvement in error probability exponent over the best known quantum illumination procedure in the low noise regime. We present a simple receiver model using four optical parametric amplifiers (OPA) that exploits hyperentanglement in the probe state to match the performance of the feed-forward sum-frequency generator (FF-SFG) receiver in the high noise regime. By replacing each OPA in the proposed model with a FF-SFG receiver, further 3dB improvement in the performance of a lone FF-SFG receiver can be seen.