Analog-to-digital conversion in the quantum regime
Abstract
Digital signal processing has become essential in quantum optics, particularly for continuous-variable (CV) information encoding, enabling coherent detection schemes and mitigation of linear impairments. While linear signal processing in double homodyne detection has been studied under the assumption that all post-measurement processing can be backpropagated in the optical domain, a rigorous treatment of the digitization chain, spanning optical, electronic, and sampling stages, is still lacking. In this work, we consider the continuous mode description of double homodyne detection to fully capture the maximum mode-matching coefficient achievable as a function of electronic noise, signal bandwidth, receiver electronics bandwidth, and sampling rate, that is the entry point of digital signal processing. We establish a dimensioning rule that generalizes the Nyquist-Shannon criterion to account for quantum fluctuations of the measured signal, not merely its bandwidth. Analyzing the case of additive white electronic noise, we find numerically that optimal signal-to-noise ratio is achieved when the electronic bandwidth is large enough to pass the signal yet narrower than the sampling rate in order to mitigate noise amplification, yielding a concrete design criterion for coherent detection.
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BibTeX
@misc{pousset2026analogtodigital,
title = {{Analog-to-digital conversion in the quantum regime}},
author = {Thomas Pousset and Matteo Schiavon and Guillaume Ricard and Elie Awwad and Romain Alléaume and Nicolas Fabre},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.07643},
eprint = {2609.07643},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07643},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Analog-to-digital conversion in the quantum regime
AU - Thomas Pousset
AU - Matteo Schiavon
AU - Guillaume Ricard
AU - Elie Awwad
AU - Romain Alléaume
AU - Nicolas Fabre
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.07643
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07643
AB - Digital signal processing has become essential in quantum optics, particularly for continuous-variable (CV) information encoding, enabling coherent detection schemes and mitigation of linear impairments. While linear signal processing in double homodyne detection has been studied under the assumption that all post-measurement processing can be backpropagated in the optical domain, a rigorous treatment of the digitization chain, spanning optical, electronic, and sampling stages, is still lacking. In this work, we consider the continuous mode description of double homodyne detection to fully capture the maximum mode-matching coefficient achievable as a function of electronic noise, signal bandwidth, receiver electronics bandwidth, and sampling rate, that is the entry point of digital signal processing. We establish a dimensioning rule that generalizes the Nyquist-Shannon criterion to account for quantum fluctuations of the measured signal, not merely its bandwidth. Analyzing the case of additive white electronic noise, we find numerically that optimal signal-to-noise ratio is achieved when the electronic bandwidth is large enough to pass the signal yet narrower than the sampling rate in order to mitigate noise amplification, yielding a concrete design criterion for coherent detection.
ER -