Homodyne-like detection for state-discrimination in the presence of phase noise

TL;DR

This paper introduces a homodyne-like detection method using photon-number-resolving detectors to improve state discrimination of coherent states affected by phase noise, with experimental validation and performance analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel detection scheme employing hybrid photodetectors for discriminating noisy coherent states, demonstrating its effectiveness through experimental results.

Findings

Reduced error probability in state discrimination

Effective handling of phase noise in coherent states

Experimental validation of the detection scheme

Abstract

We propose an innovative strategy to discriminate between two coherent states affected by either uniform or gaussian phase noise. The strategy is based on a homodyne-like detection scheme with photon-number-resolving detectors in the regime of low-intensity local oscillator. The experimental implementation of the detection scheme involves two hybrid photodetectors, whose outputs are used in post processing to calculate the shot-by-shot photon-number difference. The performance of this strategy is quantified in terms of the error probability in discriminating the noisy coherent signals as a function of the characteristic noise parameters.