Beijing, 7th March 2022 (BISTU)--- Great progress in quantum information research has been made in School of Applied Sciences of BISTU. Professor Zhao Mingjing, in collaboration with Prof. Weng Wenkang and doctoral candidates Meng Fei and Zhang Xiaoming from Southern University of Science and Technology in the area of conventional illumination and quantum illumination, has obtained the minimum-error probability of target detection. The paper “One-shot detection limits of quantum illumination with discrete signals” is published on npj Quantum Information, a high-quality Nature Portfolio journal published by Springer Nature in partnership with The University of New South Wales (UNSW Australia) on 2nd September 2020 with Prof. Zhao Mingjing as the corresponding author.  

As the interdisciplinary area between information science and quantum theory, quantum information is now on a booming stage. Quantum entanglement and positive operator-valued measure (POVM) are employed to detect the presence of target particles with potentially a low reflectivity and in a highly noisy background. It is one of the first papers which have systematically, comparatively explored conventional and quantum illumination. The parameter is classified into three distinct regions. It finds that whenever the reflectivity of the target is less than some critical value, all received signals become useless. There does exist a region where quantum illumination can provide advantages over conventional illumination. The optimal signal state is an entangled state with Schmidt number inversely proportional to the spectrum of the environmental noise state and being independent of the occurrence probability and the reflectivity of the object.  

Figure 1: Conventional illumination  

Figure 2: Quantum illumination  

The paper can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41534-020-00303-z.  

Professor Zhao Mingjing has had around 50 SCI indexed papers published in addition to 2 papers on Scientific Reports and 15 on Physical Review A.