One photon-per-bit receiver using near-noiseless phase-sensitive amplification

Space communication for deep-space missions, inter-satellite data transfer and Earth monitoring requires high-speed data connectivity. The reach is fundamentally dictated by the available transmission power, the aperture size, and the receiver sensitivity. A transition from radio-frequency links to optical links is now seriously being considered, as this greatly reduces the channel loss caused by diffraction. A widely studied approach uses power-efficient formats along with nanowire-based photon-counting receivers cooled to a few Kelvins operating at speeds below 1 Gb/s. However, to achieve the multi-Gb/s data rates that will be required in the future, systems relying on pre-amplified receivers together with advanced signal generation and processing techniques from fibre communications are also considered. The sensitivity of such systems is largely determined by the noise figure (NF) of the pre-amplifier, which is theoretically 3 dB for almost all amplifiers. Phase-sensitive optical amplifiers (PSAs) with their uniquely low NF of 0 dB promise to provide the best possible sensitivity for Gb/s-rate long-haul free-space links. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach using a PSA-based receiver in a free-space transmission experiment with an unprecedented bit-error-free, black-box sensitivity of 1 photon-per-information-bit (PPB) at an information rate of 10.5 Gb/s. The system adopts a simple modulation format (quadrature-phase-shift keying, QPSK), standard digital signal processing for signal recovery and forward-error correction and is straightforwardly scalable to higher data rates.