Quantum Illumination

TL;DR

Quantum illumination leverages entangled light to significantly improve detection and imaging performance in noisy, lossy environments, achieving exponential enhancements over classical methods.

Contribution

This paper demonstrates that entangled light can exponentially enhance detection and imaging capabilities in noisy conditions, a novel application of quantum entanglement.

Findings

Entangled illumination improves signal-to-noise ratio exponentially.

Detection with entanglement outperforms classical methods in noise.

Quantum illumination offers substantial advantages in noisy environments.

Abstract

The use of entangled light to illuminate objects is shown to provide significant enhancements over unentangled light for detecting and imaging those objects in the presence of high levels of noise and loss. Each signal sent out is entangled with an ancilla, which is retained. Detection takes place via an entangling measurement on the returning signal together with the ancilla. Quantum illumination with e bits of entanglement increases the effective signal-to-noise ratio of detection and imaging by a factor of 2^e, an exponential improvement over unentangled illumination.