Microwave Quantum Radar’s Alphabet Soup: QI, QI-MPA, QCN, QCN-CR
Jeffrey H. Shapiro · 2021
The Internet is agog with stories about quantum radar. Will it really make stealth aircraft vulnerable? Were the microwave experiments reported in 2020 from Europe and Canada really proof-of-principle laboratory demonstrations of quantum radar's advantage over classical radar? Or, does the 25 September 2020 news article in Science-entitled "The short, strange life of quantum radar"-paint the true picture? This paper disentangles microwave quantum radar's alphabet soup: quantum illumination (QI) radar, quantum illumination with a microwave parametric amplifier receiver (QI-MPA) radar, quantum-correlated noise (QCN) radar, and quantum-correlated noise radar with a correlation receiver (QCN-CR). In particular, it evaluates-with no explicit quantum-mechanical notation or calculations-these radars' miss probabilities at fixed false-alarm probability and it compares them to those for classical radar's relevant alphabet soup, viz., coherent-state homodyne (CS-Hom) radar, coherent-state heterodyne (CS-Het) radar, classically-correlated noise (CCN) radar, and classically-correlated noise radar with a correlation receiver (CCN-CR). These comparisons show that, under ideal operating conditions, the QI and QI-MPA radars offer performance advantages over their best classical counterparts. Moreover, QI-MPA's advantage is similar to that for its error-probability exponent when target absence and presence are equally likely and all radars make minimum error-probability decisions based on their respective measurements. Available theory, however, is unable to fully quantify QI's advantage in the operating regime of interest. Ultimately-after accounting for problems that afflict QI and QI-MPA, but not their classical competitors, and factoring in realistic standoff-sensing parameters-it will be concluded that the aforementioned Science article has it correct. QI target detection has little to offer for standoff sensing, i.e., it does not compromise stealth aircraft.