Employing weak-field homodyne detection for quantum communications

Abstract

We investigate the role of weak-field homodyne (WF) measurement for quantum communications over a lossy bosonic channel with coherent state encoding. This kind of receiver employs photon-number resolving (PNR) detectors with finite resolution and low-intensity local oscillator. As a figure of merit, we consider the mutual information for a Gaussian input modulation. We prove an enhancement over Shannon capacity in the photon starved regime, obtained by exploiting information on the mean signal energy to suitably optimize the local oscillator intensity. Thereafter, we investigate the performance of non-Gaussian modulation, by considering a Gamma distribution of the energy of the encoded pulses, and achieve an increase in the information rate with respect to the Gaussian modulation case in the intermediate energy regime, being more accentuated for low values of the PNR resolution.