Enhancing LIDAR performance metrics using continuous-wave photon-pair sources

We exploit the strong temporal correlation within the photon pairs generated in continuous-wave(CW) pumped semiconductor waveguide to enhance the noise resilience of free-space phase-insensitive target detection. The non-classical sources enhanced scheme is compared to a classical target detection scheme based on simple photon counting detection. The performance of both schemes is quantified as the estimation uncertainty and Fisher information of the probe photon transmission, which is as a widely adopted figure of merit for phase-insensitive sensing. The target detection experiments are conducted with high probe channel loss (\(\simeq 1-5\times10^{-5}\)) and formidable environment noise up to 36dB stronger than the detected probe photon flux (\(\simeq\)128 counts per second). The experimental result shows significant advantages of the enhanced scheme with up to \blue{26.3}dB higher performance in terms of estimation uncertainty, which is equivalent to a reduction of target detection time by a factor of \blue{430} or \blue{146}(\blue{21.6} dB) times more resilience to noise. We also experimentally demonstrated ranging with non-classical photon pairs generated with CW pump in the presence of strong noise and loss, achieving \(\approx\)5cm distance resolution that is limited by the temporal resolution of the detectors.