Quantum Induced Coherence Light Detection and Ranging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum induced coherence LiDAR that uses entangled photons to measure distance while being inherently resistant to ambient noise and jamming, improving robustness over traditional methods.

Contribution

The authors design and validate a novel QuIC LiDAR that leverages quantum interference to eliminate the impact of background noise and jamming, advancing quantum sensing technology.

Findings

Demonstrated noise immunity with LED and laser sources

Achieved accurate distance measurement despite background noise

Validated the method's resistance to jamming attacks

Abstract

Quantum illumination has been proposed and demonstrated to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in light detection and ranging (LiDAR). When relying on coincidence detection, such a quantum LiDAR is limited by the response time of the detector and suffers from jamming noise. Inspired by the Zou-Wang-Mandel experiment, we design, construct and validate a quantum induced coherence (QuIC) LiDAR which is inherently immune to ambient and jamming noises. In traditional LiDAR the direct detection of the reflected probe photons suffers from deteriorating SNR for increasing background noise. In QuIC LiDAR we circumvent this obstacle by only detecting the entangled reference photons, whose single-photon interference fringes are used to obtain the distance of the object, while the reflected probe photons are used to erase path information of the reference photons. In consequence, the noise accompanying the reflected probe light has no effect on the detected signal. We demonstrate such noise resilience with both LED and laser light to mimic the background noise and jamming attack. The proposed method paves a new way of battling noise in precise quantum electromagnetic sensing and ranging.