Equivalent efficiency of a simulated photon-number detector
Abstract
Homodyne detection is considered as a way to improve the efficiency of communication near the single-photon level. The loss of photons in current photon-number detectors significantly reduces the mutual information of a communication channel. We consider simulating direct detection via dual homodyne detection. We compare our simulated photon-number detection with ordinary direct detection by equating the mutual information in a communication channel optimized for direct detection. We find that our particular simulated direct detection strategy could provide limited improvements in information transfer relative to the current generation of direct photon counters. However, we argue that homodyne detectors (and a polynomial number of linear optics elements) cannot simulate photocounters arbitrarily well, since otherwise the exponential gap between quantum and classical computers would vanish.Keywords
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