Quantum and non-local effects offer over 40 dB noise resilience advantage towards quantum lidar
Phillip S. Blakey, Han Liu, Georgios Papangelakis, Yutian Zhang, Zacharie M. Léger, Meng Lon Iu, Amr S. Helmy
Abstract
Non-local effects have the potential to radically move forward quantum enhanced imaging to provide an advantage over classical imaging not only in laboratory environments but practical implementation. In this work, we demonstrate a 43dB higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) using a quantum enhanced LiDAR based on time-frequency entanglement compared with a classical phase-insensitive quantum imaging system. Our system can tolerate more than 3 orders of magnitude higher noise than classical single-photon counting quantum imaging systems before detector saturation with a detector dead time of 25ns. To achieve these advantages, we use non-local cancellation of dispersion to take advantage of the strong temporal correlations in photon pairs in spite of the orders of magnitude larger detector temporal uncertainty. We go on to incorporate this scheme with purpose-built scanning collection optics to image non-reflecting targets in an environment with noise.