  The quantum states of two laser pulses---coherent states---are never mutually
orthogonal, making perfect discrimination impossible. Even so, coherent states
can achieve the ultimate quantum limit for capacity of a classical channel, the
Holevo capacity. Attaining this requires the receiver to make joint-detection
measurements on long codeword blocks, optical implementations of which remain
unknown. We report the first experimental demonstration of a joint-detection
receiver, demodulating quaternary pulse-position-modulation (PPM) codewords at
a word error rate of up to 40% (2.2 dB) below that attained with
direct-detection, the largest error-rate improvement over the standard quantum
limit reported to date. This is accomplished with a conditional nulling
receiver, which uses optimized-amplitude coherent pulse nulling, single photon
detection and quantum feedforward. We further show how this translates into
coding complexity improvements for practical PPM systems, such as in deep-space
communication. We anticipate our experiment to motivate future work towards
building Holevo-capacity-achieving joint-detection receivers.

Quantum Physics