Entanglement Assisted Radars Operated over Strong Atmospheric Turbulence Channels

In this invited paper we review our recent research activities on experimental demonstration of entanglement based (EB) radars, operated over strong atmospheric turbulence channels. In conventional EB communications, sensing, and radars the phase-conjugation, required before homodyne detection takes place, is performed on received signal photons. In atmospheric turbulent channels, the signal photons are affected by diffraction, absorption, scattering, and atmospheric turbulence effects so that only limited number of weak target probe returned signal photons reach the receiver side in EB radars. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to perform any phase-conjugation on weak signal photons when the average number of received photons is <<1. To solve this problem, we have recently proposed to perform phase-conjugation on bright idler photons instead. Namely, we perform the wavelength conversion by the PPLN waveguide on bright idler photons, so that the idler photons will have the same wavelength as the signal photons, and after that we use a classical homodyne balanced detector as an entanglement assisted detector. To generate entangled photon pairs, we use C-/L-band tunable laser, EDFA, the PPLN waveguide, and WDM demultiplexers. To demonstrate the high-potential of the proposed EB radar concept, we developed an experimental outdoor free-space optical (FSO) testbed at the University of Arizona campus. Using this FSO testbed we experimentally demonstrate that the proposed EB radar significantly outperforms the corresponding classical counterpart and can operate in strong turbulence regime. To improve the detection probabilities further, we use deformable mirror-based adaptive optics.