John Anderson Building

Impact of microwave scattering. (a) and (b) spectra as a function of MW field when the antenna is rotated by around the -axis. (c)-(d) Corresponding energy lines obtained with our model. The dashed lines indicate the AT splitting expected in the fine structure basis. In (c), the data points represent the AT peaks positions extracted using a four-Gaussian fit. The error bars are the standard error of the fit normalized by the reduced .

The task of sensing the presence of a target object using a weak light source is challenging when the object is embedded in a noisy environment. One possibility is to use quantum illumination to do this, as it can outperform classical illumination in determining the object presence and range. This advantage persists even when both classical and quantum illumination are restricted to identical suboptimal object-detection measurements based on nonsimultaneous, phase-insensitive coincidence counts.

Quantum illumination uses quantum correlations to provide an enhanced detection of an object in the presence of background noise. This advantage has been shown to exist even if one uses nonoptimal direct measurements on the two correlated modes. Here we present a protocol that mimics the behavior of quantum illumination, but does not use correlated or entangled modes. Instead, the protocol uses coherent (or phase-randomized coherent) pulses with randomly chosen intensities.