Quantum Optical Communication Systems

The project will develop new concepts for optical communication systems using recent advances in quantum information science and quantum optics. The central idea comes from reformulating the communication task as an identification problem for non-orthogonal quantum states describing individual inputs rather than transmitting information in classical variables, such as intensity, phase, or quadratures, whose conventional measurements are bounded by standard quantum limits. Such a general approach, combined with the currently available toolbox for optical signal processing and characterisation at the quantum level opens up ways to attain sub-shot noise error rates and superadditivity of accessible information through joint detection. These objectives will be complemented by the development of realistic models for optical communication channels and the analysis of resources in communication protocols.