On the application of a Silicon photomultiplier-based receiver for binary phase-shift-keying protocols

Abstract: Over the past decade, binary phase-shift keying %communication encoding has been used as a benchmark to test the performance of different detection strategies to address the problem of state discrimination. In this context, hybrid devices, giving access to both particle- and wave-like properties of light, could offer the possibility to better discriminate the sent signals. In this work, we consider a %communication quantum channel exploiting a hybrid receiver embedding Silicon photomultipliers as photon-number-resolving detectors. We retrieve the discrimination error probability and the mutual information between sender and receiver as functions of some relevant experimental parameters in the case of binary phase-shifted coherent states. Our promising results, supported also with numerical simulations and theoretical analysis, foster further using this kind of hybrid receiver in more complex detections schemes.