Imperfect photon detection in quantum illumination

Abstract: In quantum illumination, various detection schemes have been proposed for harnessing remaining quantum correlations of the entanglement-based resource state. To this date, the only successful implementation in the microwave domain relies on a specific mixing operation of the respective return and idler modes, followed by single-photon counting in one of the two mixer outputs. We investigate the performance of this scheme for realistic detection parameters in terms of detection efficiency, dark count probability, and photon number resolution. Furthermore, we take into account the second mixer output and investigate the advantage of correlated photon counting (CPC) for a varying thermal background and optimum post-processing weighting in CPC. We find that the requirements for photon number resolution in the two mixer outputs are highly asymmetric due to different associated photon number expectation values.