Superadditive communication with the green machine as a practical demonstration of nonlocality without entanglement

Achieving the ultimate Holevo limit of optical communication capacity requires a joint-detection receiver that makes a collective quantum measurement over multiple modulated symbols. Such superadditivity—a higher communication rate than is achievable by symbol-by-symbol optical detection—is a special case of the well-known nonlocality without entanglement and has yet to be demonstrated. In this article, we propose and demonstrate the design of a joint-detection receiver, the Green Machine, that can achieve superadditivity. We build this receiver, experimentally obtain the transition probability matrix induced by the codebook-receiver pair, and deduce that its capacity surpasses that of any symbol-by-symbol receiver in the photon-starved regime for binary-phase-shift-keying (BPSK)modulation. Our Green Machine receiver can also significantly reduce the transmitter peak power requirement compared with the pulse-position modulation (the conventional modulation format used for deep space laser communication). We further demonstrate that the self-referenced phase makes it resilient to phase noise, e.g., atmospheric turbulence or platform vibrations.