Quantum illumination
Quantum illumination is a paradigm for target detection that employs quantum entanglement between a signal electromagnetic mode and an idler electromagnetic mode, as well as joint measurement of these modes. The signal mode is propagated toward a region of space, and it is either lost or reflected, depending on whether a target is absent or present, respectively. In principle, quantum illumination can be beneficial even if the original entanglement is completely destroyed by a lossy and noisy environment. Introduction Many quantum information applications, such as quantum teleportation, quantum error correction, and superdense coding, rely on entanglement. However, entanglement is a fragile quantum property between particles and can be easily destroyed by loss and noise arising from interaction with the environment, leading to quantum decoherence. Entanglement is therefore considered very hard to use in lossy and noisy environment. Lloyd, Shapiro and collaborators showed that even though entanglement itself may not survive, the residual correlation between the two initially entangled systems remains much higher than any initial classical states can provide. This implies that the use of entanglement should not be dismissed in entanglement-breaking scenarios. Quantum illumination takes advantage of this stronger-than-classical residual correlations between two systems to achieve a performance enhancement