大气闪烁对纠缠相干态量子干涉雷达影响机理

介绍了量子干涉雷达物理模型及其探测原理,并采用耗散-涨落通道处理量子光场在湍流大气中的传输,从经典湍流统计理论推导得到大气透射率的概率密度分布函数P(T),以此为基础系统分析了大气闪烁效应对纠缠相干态量子干涉雷达的影响机理,深入讨论了平均大气透射率、闪烁指数等大气参数对系统目标探测性能的影响.研究发现:低损耗情况下系统灵敏度及分辨率性能随闪烁指数的增加而降低;高损耗情况下大气闪烁则能显著提高系统灵敏度和分辨率性能,且界定高低损耗的透射率临界点随脉冲光子数增加而增加,故大气闪烁能够在一定程度上克服大气损耗造成的不良影响.

Influence of atmospheric scintillation on entangled coherent states quantum interferometric radar

Much interest has been aroused in quantum metrology such as quantum interferometric radar, due to its application in sub-Raleigh ranging and remote sensing. Generally, the quantum signal emitted by quantum radar will be affected by atmosphere medium. For instance, both atmospheric loss and atmospheric scintillation seriously affect the sensitivity and resolution of quantum radar. In fact, the effects of atmospheric loss on the sensitivity and resolution of quantum interferometric radar have been investigated thoroughly and completely in the past decades. However, the investigation about the influence of atmospheric scintillation is lacking until now. To realize practical quantum interferometric radar, the perturbation coming from turbulent atmosphere must be considered, thus it is necessary to investigate how the atmospheric scintillation affects the performance of quantum radar.
In this paper, the influence of intensity fluctuation which is caused by atmospheric scintillation on the performance of quantum interferometric radar with entangled coherent states (ECS) is thoroughly investigated. We first introduce the physical model of quantum interferometric radar, and the dynamic evolution of quantum light field in atmosphere is obtained by solving the master equation of dissipation channel. Considering the dissipation and fluctuation caused by atmospheric scintillation, we regard the turbulent atmosphere as so-called dissipation-fluctuation channel. Moreover, according to classical statistical theory of turbulence, we derive the explicit expression of probability distribution of transmission coefficient P(T), this probability distribution of transmission cofficient, which is determined by average transmission coefficient TD and scintillation index β_D² plays a crucial role in the studying of atmospheric scintillation.
The results of investigation show that atmospheric scintillation leads to the degradation of the sensitivity and resolution of ECS quantum interferometric radar at lower atmospheric loss. Under the higher lossy condition of atmosphere, atmospheric scintillation can greatly enhance the performance of quantum interferometric radar. Furthermore, the critical atmospheric transmission coefficient which determines the lower and higher loss of atmosphere keeps increasing with the increase of average photon number per pulse. Increasing the atmospheric scintillation, rather than introducing noise and degrading the performance of quantum radar, can improve the sensitivity and resolution.
This anomalous phenomenon can be explained only by quantum decoherence theory. As is well known, the supersensitivity and super-resolution of quantum radar are based on the nonlocal characteristic of quantum light field, while the dissipation process will induce decoherence that leads to the loss of nonlocal characteristic, and finally degrades the performance of quantum radar. However, there have been several researches indicating that the dissipation-fluctuation channel can alleviate the decoherence effect and maintain the nonlocal characteristic of quantum light field compared with pure dissipation channel. For the evolution of quantum light field in dissipation medium, the loss of amplitude plays a crucial role at a lower loss, while the decoherence will play a dominant role at a higher loss. Consequently, the fluctuation may induce extra noise and degrade the performance of quantum radar at lower loss. For higher loss, the fluctuation can prevent the decoherence process and maintain the quantum characteristic of light field, thus the atmospheric scintillation finally improves the sensitivity and resolution of quantum radar.