21 research outputs found
Discrimination of Optical Coherent States using a Photon Number Resolving Detector
The discrimination of non-orthogonal quantum states with reduced or without
errors is a fundamental task in quantum measurement theory. In this work, we
investigate a quantum measurement strategy capable of discriminating two
coherent states probabilistically with significantly smaller error
probabilities than can be obtained using non-probabilistic state
discrimination. We find that appropriate postselection of the measurement data
of a photon number resolving detector can be used to discriminate two coherent
states with small error probability. We compare our new receiver to an optimal
intermediate measurement between minimum error discrimination and unambiguous
state discrimination.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure