A detailed description of the experimental realization of a quantum illumination protocol

In this paper we propose and realise a practical quantum enhanced sensing protocol aimed at the detection of a partially reflecting object in a lossy and noisy environment. Our scheme is inspired by the theoretical quantum illumination protocol elaborated by Lloyd (2008 Science 321, 1463) and Tan et al (2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 253601). We demonstrate that when only photon counting is allowed our quantum protocol performs astonishingly better than the best classical counterpart. (paper)