Virtual Modes for Quantum Illumination

Abstract

Quantum sensing offers theoretical advantages over traditional classical alternatives. In the case of active radio- frequency quantum sensors, however, there exist several practical challenges, the most significant of which is the fast and efficient generation of a large number of entangled microwave photons. In a previous paper we proposed a method, called virtual modes, for mitigating this limitation by using a distributed architecture of quantum sensor units to synthetically increase the effective number of distinguishable modes available for target detection. Although this architecture was shown to incur an increase in noise cross-contamination, we showed that judicious sensor configurations can mitigate this effect. In this paper we examine more sophisticated cross-noise statistical models that permit the number and spatial distribution of sensors to be optimized to further reduce the net detection error probability of the proposed approach.