Interstellar communication. V. Introduction to photon information efficiency (in bits per photon)

How many bits of information can a single photon carry? Intuition says “one”, but this is incorrect. With an alphabet based on the photon’s time of arrival, energy, and polarization, several bits can be encoded. In this introduction to photon information efficiency, we explain how to calculate the maximum number of bits per photon depending on the number of encoding modes, noise, and losses.