Practical Route to Entanglement-Assisted Communication Over Noisy Bosonic Channels

Abstract

Entanglement offers substantial advantages in quantum information processing, but loss and noise hinder its application in practical scenarios. Although it has been well known for decades that the classical communication capacity of lossy and noisy bosonic channels can be significantly enhanced by entanglement, no practical encoding and decoding schemes are available to realize any entanglement-enabled advantage. Here, we report structured encoding and decoding schemes for such an entanglement-assisted communication scenario. Specifically, we show that phase encoding on an entangled two-mode squeezed vacuum state saturates the entanglement-assisted classical communication capacity of a very noisy channel and overcomes the fundamental limit on covert communication that exists without the assistance of entanglement. We then construct receivers for optimum hypothesis-testing protocols with discrete phase modulation and for optimum noisy phase-estimation protocols with continuous phase modulation. Our results pave the way for entanglement-assisted communication and sensing in the radio-frequency and microwave spectral ranges.