Assessing a binary quantum channel exploiting a silicon photomultiplier based hybrid receiver

In quantum communication protocols, the use of photon-number-resolving detectors could open new perspectives by broadening the way to encode and decode information and merging the properties of discrete and continuous variables. In this work, we consider a quantum channel exploiting a silicon-photomultiplier-based receiver and evaluate its performance for quantum communication protocols under three possible configurations, defined by different post- processing of the detection outcomes. We investigate two scenarios: information transmission over the channel, quantified by the mutual information, and continuous-variable quantum key distribution, quantified by the key generation rate. The preliminary results encourage further use of this detection scheme in extended networks. (c) 2024 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement