All-optical correlated noisy channel and its application in recovering quantum coherence

Abstract

Attenuation and amplification are the most common processes for optical communications. Amplification can be used to compensate the attenuation of the complex amplitude of an optical field, but is unable to recover the coherence lost, provided that the attenuation channel and the amplification channel are independent. In this work, we show that the quantum coherence of an optical filed can be regained if the attenuation channel and the amplification channel share correlated noise. We propose an all-optical correlated noisy channel relying on four-wave mixing process and demonstrate its capability of recovering quantum coherence within continuous-variable systems. We quantitatively investigate the coherence recovery phenomena for coherent states and two-mode squeezed states. Moreover, we analyze the effect of other photon losses that are independent with the recovery channel on the performance of recovering coherence. Different from correlated noisy channels previously proposed based on electro-optic conversions, the correlated noisy channel in our protocol is all-optical and thus owns larger operational bandwidths.