Practical Receiver for Optimal Discrimination of Binary Coherent Signals.

We address the long-standing problem of discriminating coherent states with the minimum error rate. We show an optimum receiver for coherent states which admits a relatively simple implementation with current technologies. The receiver is based on multichannel splitting of the signal, followed by feed-forward signal displacement and photon-counting detection. We develop an optimal control strategy for a finite signal split and show convergence of the error rate to the Helstrom bound.