Quantum illumination via quantum-enhanced sensing

Abstract

Quantum-enhanced sensing has a goal of enhancing a parameter sensitivity with input quantum states, while quantum illumination has a goal of enhancing a target detection capability with input entangled states in a heavy noise environment. Here we propose a concatenation between quantum-enhanced sensing and quantum illumination that can take quantum advantage over the classical limit. First, phase sensing in an interferometry is connected to a target sensing via quantum Fisher information. Second, the target sensitivity is investigated in noisy quantum-enhanced sensing. Under the same input state energy, for example, $N$-photon entangled states can exhibit better performance than a two-mode squeezed vacuum state and a separable coherent state. Incorporating a photon-number difference measurement, finally, the noisy target sensitivity is connected to a signal-to-noise ratio which is associated with a minimum error probability of discriminating the presence and absence of the target. We show that both the target sensitivity and the signal-to-noise ratio can be enhanced with increasing thermal noise.