Multi-pulse Fourier codes for bit transmission at the quantum limit

Bit-transmission can be enhanced by the use of quantum detection techniques, realizing a joint-detection receiver (JDR) that is able to decode transmitted signals via a collective operation and achieve the Holevo channel capacity. Explicit JDR designs proposed so far employ the Hadamard or Fourier transform to perform a phase-to-intensity translation of the information encoding, effectively falling in the class of on-off-keying (OOK) modulation techniques; they improve over classical decoders but fall short of the Holevo capacity, particularly at large signal mean photon number n greater than or similar to 1. Here we introduce new families of decoders based on multi-pulse and multi-level codes. We compute the rate of these codes exactly, and provide a comprehensive study of their performance. We show that multi-pulse codes can approach the rate of OOK closely, providing a simplified design for quantum-enhanced communication in the photon-starved regime; furthermore, multi-level codes can approach generalized-OOK strategies with multiple pulse types, thus they can be employed in the larger photon-number regime.