Abstract: To investigate the effect of atmospheric charged particles in thunderstorm clouds on the detection performance of quantum interference radar (QIR), the relationship between the complex refractive index of charged particles and their surface charge density was analyzed based on the charged particle model. Firstly, according to the attenuation model of charged particles, the relationship between particle mass concentration, transmission distance, and link attenuation was examined. Furthermore, models depicting the relationships between particle concentration, surface charge density, and QIR system sensitivity, as well as system resolution, under different numbers of emitted photons, were established, and the corresponding simulation experiments were conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that when the number of pulse photons emitted by the transmitter is fixed, both of the sensitivity and resolution of QIR system decrease with the increase of particle mass concentration and particle surface charge density. And given the same mass concentration of particles, the resolution of QIR system increases with the number of photons, while the sensitivity decreases accordingly. This study confirms that the scattering properties of charged particles in thunderstorm clouds have a non-negligible effect on the detection performance of QIR system.

Key words: quantum optics, quantum interference radar, thunderstorm cloud, atmospheric charged particles, sensitivity, resolution