Quantum Advantage in Sensing and Imaging through Coherent Nuisance Suppression
Abstract
Many sensing and imaging problems must contend with unknown nuisance parameters such as aberrations, background fields, and drift, and the cost of removing these noise sources can dominate the sample budget. In contrast to classical receivers, a quantum receiver can processes samples jointly to directly access observables in which common nuisance is suppressed. We introduce a relational Fourier sampling algorithm for optimal, source-independent imaging with a programmable quantum camera, which uses quantum pixels and a quantum computer to capture and process photon states. We demonstrate its relevance for general astronomical imaging as well as super-resolution and transient-object tracking through drifting atmospheric turbulence. A quantum camera that resolves an optical wavefront across 2q spatial modes using q receiving qubits, with a full-rank and strongly-correlated nuisance over those modes, can yield an exponential sample-complexity reduction of exp[Ω(2q)]. For typical seeing conditions at leading ground-based observatories, we predict more than three orders of magnitude fewer photons to resolve point-source positions using only 15 processing qubits and a depth-9 circuit. Our work identifies coherent nuisance suppression as a novel mechanism for provable quantum advantage with direct relevance to many sensing tasks.
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BibTeX
@misc{sirotin2026quantum,
title = {{Quantum Advantage in Sensing and Imaging through Coherent Nuisance Suppression}},
author = {Maxim Sirotin and Aleksandr Mokeev and Ishaan Kannan and Julian C. Christou and Jayadev Rajagopal and Babak Saif and Mikhail D. Lukin and Johannes Borregaard},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.05868},
eprint = {2611.05868},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05868},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Quantum Advantage in Sensing and Imaging through Coherent Nuisance Suppression
AU - Maxim Sirotin
AU - Aleksandr Mokeev
AU - Ishaan Kannan
AU - Julian C. Christou
AU - Jayadev Rajagopal
AU - Babak Saif
AU - Mikhail D. Lukin
AU - Johannes Borregaard
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/04
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.05868
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05868
AB - Many sensing and imaging problems must contend with unknown nuisance parameters such as aberrations, background fields, and drift, and the cost of removing these noise sources can dominate the sample budget. In contrast to classical receivers, a quantum receiver can processes samples jointly to directly access observables in which common nuisance is suppressed. We introduce a relational Fourier sampling algorithm for optimal, source-independent imaging with a programmable quantum camera, which uses quantum pixels and a quantum computer to capture and process photon states. We demonstrate its relevance for general astronomical imaging as well as super-resolution and transient-object tracking through drifting atmospheric turbulence. A quantum camera that resolves an optical wavefront across 2^q spatial modes using q receiving qubits, with a full-rank and strongly-correlated nuisance over those modes, can yield an exponential sample-complexity reduction of exp[Ω(2^q)]. For typical seeing conditions at leading ground-based observatories, we predict more than three orders of magnitude fewer photons to resolve point-source positions using only 15 processing qubits and a depth-9 circuit. Our work identifies coherent nuisance suppression as a novel mechanism for provable quantum advantage with direct relevance to many sensing tasks.
ER -