Practical approach to extending baselines of telescopes using continuous-variable quantum information

Abstract Interferometric telescopes are instrumental for the imaging of distant astronomical bodies, but optical loss heavily restricts how far telescopes in an array can be placed from one another, leading to a bottleneck in the resolution that can be achieved. An entanglement-assisted approach to this problem has been proposed by (Gottesman et al 2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 109 070503), as a possible solution to the issue of optical loss if the entangled state can be distributed across long distances by employing a quantum repeater network. In this paper, we propose an alternative entanglement-assisted scheme that interferes a two-mode squeezed vacuum state with the astronomical state and then measures the resulting state by means of homodyne detection. We use a continuous-variable approach and compute the Fisher information with respect to the mutual coherence of the astronomical source. We show that when the Fisher information is observed cumulatively at the rate at which successful measurements can be performed, our proposed scheme does not outperform the traditional direct detection approach or the entanglement-assisted approach of GJC12.