Quantum-enabled networked radar sensing

Networked radars face many difficulties including synchronisation issues and high close-in phase noise. When the radar is phase noise limited, greater signal returns are required for a target detection.

With the use of quantum clocks with instabilities and uncertainties of better than 10-17, phase noise can be reduced significantly by several orders of magnitude and consequently there could potentially be a stark change in the detectability of small or slow-moving targets in a congested as well as contested environment.

Full synchronisation of each radar node can result in the coherent operation of the radar network and this leads to many potential benefits such as detection of stealth targets and significantly increased accuracy of positional measurements. At our University campus, we have built a networked radar test bed consisting of two radars.

Here we propose to characterise and evaluate the performance of a phase stabilised and fully synchronised networked radar system fully enabled by quantum oscillators with ultralow phase noise.