Demonstration of near-Optimal Discrimination of Optical Coherent States

TL;DR

This paper presents an experimental demonstration of a new quantum measurement strategy that outperforms standard methods in discriminating two optical coherent states with lower error probabilities, advancing quantum communication techniques.

Contribution

The authors propose and experimentally realize a novel measurement approach that surpasses traditional methods like Kennedy and homodyne receivers in quantum state discrimination.

Findings

Achieved lower error probabilities than standard measurement devices.

Demonstrated practical implementation of the new quantum measurement strategy.

Enhanced performance in optical coherent state discrimination.

Abstract

The optimal discrimination of non-orthogonal quantum states with minimum error probability is a fundamental task in quantum measurement theory as well as an important primitive in optical communication. In this work, we propose and experimentally realize a new and simple quantum measurement strategy capable of discriminating two coherent states with smaller error probabilities than can be obtained using the standard measurement devices; the Kennedy receiver and the homodyne receiver.