Interstellar Communication. VIII. Hard limits on the number of bits per photon

2018/01/18 by Hippke, Michael
#FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1801.06218

Abstract

A photon can encode several bits of information based on an alphabet of its time of arrival, energy, and polarization. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle places a limit on measuring pairs of physical properties of a particle, limiting the maximal information efficiency to <59 bits per photon in practice, and <171 bits per photon at Planck energy, at a data rate of one photon per second.

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