Effect of charged sand/dust atmosphere on performance of microwave quantum illumination radar

Abstract

<sec>This work is to study the effects of charged sand/dust atmosphere on the performances of microwave quantum illumination (QI) radar. Based on Mie particle scattering theory, using a Monte Carlo method for simulating the physical process in which photon is scattered multiple times by discrete random distributed particles, the specific attenuation (dB/km) of microwave propagating in sand/dust atmosphere are analyzed under the conditions of varying atmospheric visibility and sand/dust particles with different charged quantities. It is indicated that the specific attenuation obtained by multiple scattering is smaller than that obtained based on Mie theory, for microwave propagating in charged sand/dust atmosphere. The smaller the atmospheric visibility, the greater the difference is, while the difference decreases gradually as the atmospheric visibility increases. Then, it is more reasonable to consider multiple scattering attenuation at lower atmospheric visibility. When sand/dust particle is charged, the specific attenuation is increased, however, this increase is not linear.</sec><sec>According to quantum illumination radar theory, a beam splitter-based optical link model is used to simulate the sand/dust atmospheric channel. The effects of charged sand/dust atmosphere with different visibility on the detection error probability, signal-to-noise ratio, and maximum detection range for microwave quantum illumination radar are studied by using quantum radar equation and quantum detection error probability theory. The performances between QI radar and classical two-mode noise (TMN) radar are compared and analyzed. These results show that the performances of quantum illumination radar are improved with sand/dust atmospheric visibility increasing. When sand/dust particles are charged, the performances for QI radar are degraded due to attenuation increasing. The change in the performance is nonlinear with the variation of sand/dust carrying charge quantity. When visibility is high, increasing the signal frequency can improve the performance of quantum illumination radar, but when visibility is low, the gain of frequency increase is offset by the performance decline caused by attenuation increase. Therefore, it is not recommended to increase the frequency in such a case. The comparison with classical radar reveals that QI radar performs better under the condition of lower atmospheric visibility and lower average photon emission, but this advantage diminishes as the number of photons increases.</sec><sec>In a word, these results show that the performances of QI radar are more significant at lower atmospheric visibility. Under higher visibility conditions, the QI system SNR can be improved by increasing frequency. The maximum detection range of the QI radar is significantly better than that of the classical TMN radar.</sec>