Quantum-enhanced Doppler lidar

Abstract

We propose a quantum-enhanced lidar system to estimate a target’s radial velocity, which employs squeezed and frequency-entangled signal and idler beams. We compare its performance against a classical protocol using a coherent state with the same pulse duration and energy, showing that quantum resources provide a precision enhancement in the estimation of the velocity of the object. We identify three distinct parameter regimes characterized by the amount of squeezing and frequency entanglement. In two of them, a quantum advantage exceeding the standard quantum limit is achieved assuming no photon losses. Additionally, we show that an optimal measurement to attain these results in the lossless case is frequency-resolved photon counting. Finally, we consider the effect of photon losses for the high-squeezing regime, which leads to a constant factor quantum advantage higher than 3 dB in the variance of the estimator, given a roundtrip lidar-to-target-to-lidar transmissivity larger than 50%.