Symmetric and asymmetric discrimination of bosonic loss: Toy applications to biological samples and photodegradable materials

We consider quantum discrimination of bosonic loss based on both symmetric and asymmetric hypothesis testing. In both approaches, an entangled resource is able to outperform any classical strategy based on coherent-state transmitters in the regime of low photon numbers. In the symmetric case, we then consider the low-energy detection of bacterial growth in culture media. Assuming an exponential growth law for the bacterial concentration and the Beer-Lambert law for the optical transmissivity of the sample, we find that the use of entanglement allows one to achieve a much faster detection of growth with respect to the use of coherent states. This performance is also studied by assuming an exponential photo degradable model, where the concentration is reduced by increasing the number of photons irradiated over the sample. This investigation is then extended to the readout of classical information from suitably designed photodegradable optical memories.