Non-Classical Semiconductor Photon Sources Enhancing the Performance of Classical Target Detection Systems

We demonstrate and analyze how deploying non-classical intensity correlations obtained from a monolithic semiconductor quantum photon source can enhance classical target detection systems. This is demonstrated by examining the advantages offered by the utilization of the non-classical correlations in a correlation based target detection protocol. We experimentally demonstrate that under the same condition, the target contrast obtained from the protocol when non-classical correlations are utilized exhibits an improvement of up to 17.79 dB over the best classical intensity correlation-based target detection protocol [1], under 29.69dB channel loss and excess noise 13.40dB stronger than the probe signal. We also assessed how the strong frequency correlations within the non-classical photon pairs can be used to further enhance this protocol.