On the application of a Silicon photomultiplier-based receiver for binary phase-shift-keying protocols

TL;DR

This paper investigates a hybrid receiver using Silicon photomultipliers for binary phase-shift keying, demonstrating improved state discrimination and information transfer in quantum communication channels through theoretical and numerical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid detection scheme with Silicon photomultipliers for BPSK, analyzing its performance in quantum communication.

Findings

Reduced discrimination error probability

Enhanced mutual information between sender and receiver

Potential for more complex detection schemes

Abstract

Over the past decade, binary phase-shift keying %communication encoding has been used as a benchmark to test the performance of different detection strategies to address the problem of state discrimination. In this context, hybrid devices, giving access to both particle- and wave-like properties of light, could offer the possibility to better discriminate the sent signals. In this work, we consider a %communication quantum channel exploiting a hybrid receiver embedding Silicon photomultipliers as photon-number-resolving detectors. We retrieve the discrimination error probability and the mutual information between sender and receiver as functions of some relevant experimental parameters in the case of binary phase-shifted coherent states. Our promising results, supported also with numerical simulations and theoretical analysis, foster further using this kind of hybrid receiver in more complex detections schemes.