Receiver Operator Characteristic Enhancement by Overcomming the Hardware Temporal Resolution Limit Using Nonlocal Effects in LiDAR

Entangled photon target detection provides a unique route to increase the noise resilience of classical LiDAR technologies by incorporating the use of probe-reference coincidence counting. One of the factors that determine the performance of these systems is the hardware temporal resolution. This is due to the noise detected within the detector time constants. To outperform this limitation, we use non-local dispersion compensation to spread noise outside of the detection window while maintaining the probe-reference coincidences. In this paper, we predict and experimentally characterize the dependence of a non-local target detection protocol on detection time, transmission, source power, and background noise by use of receiver operating characteristics (ROC). Two periodically poled Lithium Niobate crystals (PPLN) are used to create a high flux free space target detection setup. Advantages of up to 32dB noise rejection are seen with detection times below 5ms. The performance modeling is applicable to different source inputs, allowing future design and creation of large scale sensing technologies that surpass classical detection limits.