Influence of atmospheric scintillation on entangled coherent states quantum interferometric radar

Abstract

Much interest has been aroused in quantum metrology such as quantum interferometric radar, due to its application in sub-Raleigh ranging and remote sensing. Generally, the quantum signal emitted by quantum radar will be affected by atmosphere medium. For instance, both atmospheric loss and atmospheric scintillation seriously affect the sensitivity and resolution of quantum radar. In fact, the effects of atmospheric loss on the sensitivity and resolution of quantum interferometric radar have been investigated thoroughly and completely in the past decades. However, the investigation about the influence of atmospheric scintillation is lacking until now. To realize practical quantum interferometric radar, the perturbation coming from turbulent atmosphere must be considered, thus it is necessary to investigate how the atmospheric scintillation affects the performance of quantum radar.In this paper, the influence of intensity fluctuation which is caused by atmospheric scintillation on the performance of quantum interferometric radar with entangled coherent states (ECS) is thoroughly investigated. We first introduce the physical model of quantum interferometric radar, and the dynamic evolution of quantum light field in atmosphere is obtained by solving the master equation of dissipation channel. Considering the dissipation and fluctuation caused by atmospheric scintillation, we regard the turbulent atmosphere as so-called dissipation-fluctuation channel. Moreover, according to classical statistical theory of turbulence, we derive the explicit expression of probability distribution of transmission coefficient P(T), this probability distribution of transmission cofficient, which is determined by average transmission coefficient TD and scintillation index βD2 plays a crucial role in the studying of atmospheric scintillation.The results of investigation show that atmospheric scintillation leads to the degradation of the sensitivity and resolution of ECS quantum interferometric radar at lower atmospheric loss. Under the higher lossy condition of atmosphere, atmospheric scintillation can greatly enhance the performance of quantum interferometric radar. Furthermore, the critical atmospheric transmission coefficient which determines the lower and higher loss of atmosphere keeps increasing with the increase of average photon number per pulse. Increasing the atmospheric scintillation, rather than introducing noise and degrading the performance of quantum radar, can improve the sensitivity and resolution.This anomalous phenomenon can be explained only by quantum decoherence theory. As is well known, the supersensitivity and super-resolution of quantum radar are based on the nonlocal characteristic of quantum light field, while the dissipation process will induce decoherence that leads to the loss of nonlocal characteristic, and finally degrades the performance of quantum radar. However, there have been several researches indicating that the dissipation-fluctuation channel can alleviate the decoherence effect and maintain the nonlocal characteristic of quantum light field compared with pure dissipation channel. For the evolution of quantum light field in dissipation medium, the loss of amplitude plays a crucial role at a lower loss, while the decoherence will play a dominant role at a higher loss. Consequently, the fluctuation may induce extra noise and degrade the performance of quantum radar at lower loss. For higher loss, the fluctuation can prevent the decoherence process and maintain the quantum characteristic of light field, thus the atmospheric scintillation finally improves the sensitivity and resolution of quantum radar.