No Arabic abstract
It is well known that the interaction of quantum systems with the environment reduces the inherent quantum correlations. Under special circumstances the effect of decoherence can be reversed, for example, the interaction modeled by an amplitude damping channel can boost the teleportation fidelity from the classical to the quantum region for a bipartite quantum state. Here, we first show that this phenomena fails in the case of a quantum key distribution protocol. We further show that the technique of weak measurement can be used to slow down the process of decoherence, thereby helping to preserve the quantum key rate when one or both systems are interacting with the environment via an amplitude damping channel. Most interestingly, in certain cases weak measurement with post-selection where one considers both success and failure of the technique is shown to be more useful than without it when both systems interact with the environment.
Quantum key distribution (QKD offers a long-term solution to establish information-theoretically secure keys between two distant users. In practice, with a careful characterization of quantum sources and the decoy-state method, measure-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) provides secure key distribution. While short-distance fibre-based QKD has already been available for real-life implementation, the bottleneck of practical QKD lies on the limited transmission distance. Due to photon losses in transmission, it was believed that the key generation rate is bounded by a linear function of the channel transmittance, $O(eta)$, without a quantum repeater, which puts an upper bound on the maximal secure transmission distance. Interestingly, a new phase-encoding MDI-QKD scheme, named twin-field QKD, has been suggested to beat the linear bound, while another variant, named phase-matching quantum key distribution (PM-QKD), has been proven to have a quadratic key-rate improvement, $O(sqrt{eta})$. In reality, however, the intrinsic optical mode mismatch of independent lasers, accompanied by phase fluctuation and drift, impedes the successful experimental implementation of the new schemes. Here, we solve this problem with the assistance of the laser injection technique and the phase post-compensation method. In the experiment, the key rate surpasses the linear key-rate bound via 302 km and 402 km commercial-fibre channels, achieving a key rate over 4 orders of magnitude higher than the existing results in literature. Furthermore, with a 502 km ultralow-loss fibre, our system yields a secret key rate of 0.118 bps. We expect this new type of QKD schemes to become a new standard for future QKD.
Continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) with discrete modulation has received widespread attentions because of its experimental simplicity, lower-cost implementation and ease to multiplex with classical optical communication. Recently, some inspiring numerical methods have been applied to analyse the security of discrete-modulated CV-QKD against collective attacks, which promises to obtain considerable key rate over one hundred kilometers of fiber distance. However, numerical methods require up to ten minutes to calculate a secure key rate one time using a high-performance personal computer, which means that extracting the real-time secure key rate is impossible for discrete-modulated CV-QKD system. Here, we present a neural network model to quickly predict the secure key rate of homodyne detection discrete-modulated CV-QKD with good accuracy based on experimental parameters and experimental results. With the excess noise of about $0.01$, the speed of our method is improved by about seven orders of magnitude compared to that of the conventional numerical method. Our method can be extended to quickly solve complex security key rate calculation of a variety of other unstructured quantum key distribution protocols.
Device-independent quantum key distribution (DIQKD) exploits the violation of a Bell inequality to extract secure key even if the users devices are untrusted. Currently, all DIQKD protocols suffer from the secret key capacity bound, i.e., the secret key rate scales linearly with the transmittance of two users. Here we propose a heralded DIQKD scheme based on entangled coherent states to improve entangling rates whereby long-distance entanglement is created by single-photon-type interference. The secret key rate of our scheme can significantly outperform the traditional two-photon-type Bell-state measurement scheme and, importantly, surpass the above capacity bound. Our protocol therefore is an important step towards a realization of DIQKD and can be a promising candidate scheme for entanglement swapping in future quantum internet.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) allows two distant parties to share encryption keys with security based on physical laws. Experimentally, it has been implemented with optical means, achieving key rates of 1.26 Megabit/s over 50 kilometres (km) of standard optical fibre and 1.16 bit/hour over 404 km of ultralow-loss fibre in a measurement-device-independent configuration. Increasing the bit rate and range of QKD is a formidable, but important, challenge. A related target, currently considered unfeasible without quantum repeaters, is overcoming the fundamental rate-distance limit of point-to-point QKD. Here we introduce a conceptually new scheme where pairs of phase-randomised optical fields are first generated at two distant locations and then combined at a central measuring station. The fields imparted with the same random phase are twins and can be employed to distil a quantum key, as we prove under an explicit security assumption. The key rate of this Twin-Field QKD (TF-QKD) shows the same dependence on distance as a quantum repeater, scaling with the square-root of the channel transmittance, irrespective of whom is in control of the measuring station. Differently from a quantum repeater, however, the new scheme is feasible with current technology and presents manageable levels of noise even on 550 km of standard optical fibre. This is promising to overcome the QKD rate-distance barrier and to greatly extend the range of secure quantum communications.
It is known that measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) provides ultimate security from all types of side-channel attack against detectors at the expense of low key generation rate. Here, we propose MDI-QKD using 3-dimensional quantum states and show that the protocol improves the secret key rate under the analysis of mismatched-basis statistics. Specifically, we analyze security of the 3d-MDI-QKD protocol with uncharacterized sources, meaning that the original sources contain unwanted states instead of expected one. We simulate secret key rate of the protocol and identify the regime where the key rate is higher than the protocol with the qubit MDI-QKD.