Abstract

The development of new techniques to improve measurements is crucial for all sciences. By employing quantum systems as sensors to probe some physical property of interest allows the application of quantum resources, such as coherent superpositions and quantum correlations, to increase measurement precision. Here we experimentally investigate a scheme for quantum target detection based on linear optical measurement devices, when the object is immersed in unpolarized background light. By comparing the quantum (polarization-entangled photon pairs) and the classical (separable polarization states) strategies, we found that the quantum strategy provides us an improvement over the classical one in our experiment when the signal-to-noise ratio is greater than 1/40, or about 16 dB of noise. This is in constrast to quantum target detection considering nonlinear optical detection schemes, which have shown resilience to extreme amounts of noise. A theoretical model is developed which shows that, in this linear-optics context, the quantum strategy suffers from the contribution of multiple background photons. This effect does not appear in our classical scheme. By improving the two-photon detection electronics, it should be possible to achieve a polarization-based quantum advantage for a signal-to-noise ratio that is close to 1/400 for current technology.