Horace P. Yuen

Noise in homodyne and heterodyne detection

Quantum-mechanical calculations of the mean-square fluctuation spectra in optical homodyning and heterodyning are made for arbitrary input and local-oscillator quantum states. In addition to the unavoidable quantum fluctuations, it is shown that excess noise from the local oscillator always affects homodyning and, when it is broadband, also heterodyning. Both the quantum and the excess noise of the local oscillator can be eliminated by coherent subtraction of the two outputs of a 50-50 beam splitter. This result also demonstrates the fact that the basic quantum noise in homodyning and heterodyning is signal quantum fluctuation, not local-oscillator shot noise.

Optical communication with two-photon coherent states--Part III: Quantum measurements realizable with photoemissive detectors

In Part I of this three-part study it was shown that the use of two-photon coherent state (TCS) radiation may yield siginificant performance gains in free-space optical communicatinn if the receiver makes a quantum measurement of a single field quadrature. In Part II it was shown that homodyne detection achieves the same signal-to-noise ratio as the quantum field quadrature measurement, thus providing a receiver which realizes the linear modulation TCS performance gain found in Part I. Furthermore, it was shown in Part il that ff homodyne detection does exactly correspond to the field quadrature measurement, then a large binary communication performance gain is afforded by homodyne detection of antipodal TCS signals. The full equivalence of honmdyne detection and single-quadrature field measurement, as well as that of heterodyne detection and two-quadrature field measurement, is established. Furthermore, a heterodyne configuration which uses a TCS image-band oscillator in addition to the usual coherent state local oscillator is studied. This coafiguration termed TCS heterodyne detection is shown to realize all the quantum measurements described by arbitrary TCS. The foregoing results are obtained by means of a representation theorem which shows that photoemissive detection realizes the photon flux density measurement.

Optical communication with two-photon coherent states--Part I: Quantum-state propagation and quantum-noise

Recent theoretical work has shown that novel quantum states, called two-photon coherent states (TCS), have significant potential for improving free-space optical communications. The first part of a three-part study of the communication theory of TCS radiation is presented. The issues of quantum-field propagation and optimum quantum-state generation are addressed. In particular, the quantum analog of the classical paraxial diffraction theory for quasimonochromatic scalar waves is developed. This result, which describes the propagation of arbitrary quantum states as a boundary-value problem suitable for communication system analysis, is used to treat a number of quantum transmitter optimization problems. It is shown that, under near-field propagation conditions, a TCS transmitter maximizes field-measurement signal-to-noise ratio among all transmitter quantum states; the performance of the TCS system exceeds that for a conventional (coherent state) transmitter by a factor of N_{s} + 1 , where N_{s} is the average number of signal photons (transmitter energy constraint). Under far-field propagation conditions, it is shown that use of a TCS local oscillator in the receiver can, in principle, attenuate field-measurement quantum noise by a factor equal to the diffraction loss of the channel, if appropriate spatial mode mixing can be achieved. These communcation results are derived by assuming that field-quadrature quantum measurement is performed. In part II of this study, photoemissive reception of TCS radiation will be considered; it will be shown therein that homodyne detection of TCS fields can realize the field-quadrature signal - to-noise ratio performance of part I. In part III, the relationships between photoemissive detection and general quantum measurements will be explored. In particular, a synthesis procedure will be obtained for realizing all the measurements described by arbitrary TCS.

Classical Capacity of the Lossy Bosonic Channel: The Exact Solution

The classical capacity of the lossy bosonic channel is calculated exactly. It is shown that its Holevo information is not superadditive, and that a coherent-state encoding achieves capacity. The capacity of far-field, free-space optical communications is given as an example.

Optimum testing of multiple hypotheses in quantum detection theory

The problem of specifying the optimum quantum detector in multiple hypotheses testing is considered for application to optical communications. The quantum digital detection problem is formulated as a linear programming problem on an infinite-dimensional space. A necessary and sufficient condition is derived by the application of a general duality theorem specifying the optimum detector in terms of a set of linear operator equations and inequalities. Existence of the optimum quantum detector is also established. The optimality of commuting detection operators is discussed in some examples. The structure and performance of the optimal receiver are derived for the quantum detection of narrow-band coherent orthogonal and simplex signals. It is shown that modal photon counting is asymptotically optimum in the limit of a large signaling alphabet and that the capacity goes to infinity in the absence of a bandwidth limitation.

Generation and detection of two-photon coherent states in degenerate four-wave mixing

It is shown that degenerate four-wave mixing generates two-photon coherent states (TCS) of the radiation field for modes that are proper combinations of the output object and image waves. TCS light has novel quantum behavior, which can be probed by homodyne detection, intensity interferometry, or photocount statistics. Numerical estimates indicate that the generation and detection of TCS light via degenerate four-wave mixing and homodyne detection can be accomplished with current technology.

Secure communication using mesoscopic coherent states.

We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that secure communication using intermediate-energy (mesoscopic) coherent states is possible. Our scheme is different from previous quantum cryptographic schemes in that a short secret key is explicitly used and in which quantum noise hides both the bit and the key. This encryption scheme allows optical amplification. New avenues are open to secure communications at high speeds in fiber-optic or free-space channels.

Amplification of quantum states and noiseless photon amplifiers

Abstract It is shown that in principle a device exists which would duplicate a quantum system within a class of quantum states if and only if those quantum states are mutually orthogonal. The possible existence of a related noiseless photon amplifier is also established.

Multiple-parameter quantum estimation and measurement of nonselfadjoint observables

A quantum mechanical form of the Cramer-Rao inequality and a minimum-mcan-square-error quantum estimator for multiple parameters are derived, allowing all possible quantum measurements of the received field. The role of nonselfadjoint operators is emphasized in the formulation. Relations of our results to previous work on quantum estimation are discussed. For the estimation of complex mode amplitudes of coherent signals in Gaussian noise, it is shown that the optimal receiver measures the photon annihilation operator, which corresponds to optical heterodyning. This demonstrates the possible optimality of nonselfadjoint operators and clearly indicates the importance of considering more general quantum measurements in quantum signal detection.

Reduction of quantum fluctuation and suppression of the Gordon–Haus effect with phase-sensitive linear amplifiers

Compared with the use of phase-insensitive linear quantum amplifiers of the same gain G, the use of phase-sensitive linear amplifiers on phase coherent classical light sources in an amplifier-attenuator chain reduces the total quantum noise power by a factor of 4, the homodyne noise variance by 2, and the photon number variance by 2-8 and suppresses the Kerr effect linear phase fluctuation variance as well as the soliton timing-error variance by 2G(2).