On capacity of optical communications over a lossy bosonic channel with a receiver employing the most general coherent electro-optic feedback control

We study the problem of designing optical receivers to discriminate between multiple coherent states using coherent processing receiversi.e., one that uses arbitrary coherent feedback control and quantum-noise-limited direct detectionwhich was shown by Dolinar to achieve the minimum error probability in discriminating any two coherent states. We first derive and re-interpret Dolinar's binary-hypothesis minimum-probability-of-error receiver as the one that optimizes the information efficiency at each time instant, based on recursive Bayesian updates within the receiver. Using this viewpoint, we propose a natural generalization of Dolinar's receiver design to discriminate $M$ coherent states each of which could now be a codeword, i.e., a sequence of $N$ coherent states each drawn from a modulation alphabet. We analyze the channel capacity of the pure-loss optical channel with a general coherent-processing receiver in the low-photon number regime and compare it with the capacity achievable with direct detection and the Holevo limit (achieving the latter would require a quantum joint-detection receiver). We show compelling evidence that despite the optimal performance of Dolinar's receiver for the binary coherent-state hypothesis test (either in error probability or mutual information), the asymptotic communication rate achievable by such a coherent-processing receiver is only as good as direct detection. This suggests that in the infinitely-long codeword limit, all potential benefits of coherent processing at the receiver can be obtained by designing a good code and direct detection, with no feedback within the receiver.