High-dimensional quantum cryptography with twisted light

By Mohammad Mirhosseini, O. Magaña-Loaiza, M. O’Sullivan, B. Rodenburg, Mehul Malik, Martin P. J. Lavery, Miles J. Padgett, Daniel J. Gauthier, R. W. Boyd. 2014

664 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) systems often rely on polarization of light for encoding, thus limiting the amount of information that can be sent per photon and placing tight bounds on the error rates that such a system can tolerate. Here we describe a proof-of-principle experiment that indicates the feasibility of high-dimensional QKD based on the transverse structure of the light field allowing for the transfer of more than 1 bit per photon. Our implementation uses the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of photons and the corresponding mutually unbiased basis of angular position (ANG). Our experiment uses a digital micro-mirror device for the rapid generation of OAM and ANG modes at 4 kHz, and a mode sorter capable of sorting single photons based on their OAM and ANG content with a separation efficiency of 93%. Through the use of a seven-dimensional alphabet encoded in the OAM and ANG bases, we achieve a channel capacity of 2.05 bits per sifted photon. Our experiment demonstrates that, in addition to having an increased information capacity, multilevel QKD systems based on spatial-mode encoding can be more resilient against intercept-resend eavesdropping attacks.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c97db02fc4c8a5db1c32b4e4aed3e1cd76b4d7b

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Citations in the corpus

Entanglement certification from theory to experiment (2018, background): “[129] Mohammad Mirhosseini, Omar S.”
Optical communications using orbital angular momentum beams (2015, methodology): “Previous investigations of the QKD system using OAM states can be found in both theoretical analysis and experimental demonstration, including (a) the secure information capacity as well as security analysis of a high-dimensional OAM-based QKD system [104,106,107], (b) high-dimensional OAM entanglem”
Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, neutral): “[257] M.”
Roadmap on structured light (2016, background): “Although the versatility and efficiency of such devices already meet the required standards, their usefulness in future applications or novel proof-of-concept experiments is limited to modulation frequencies of at most a few kHz [181].”
Practical challenges in quantum key distribution (2016, neutral): “86,87 RR-DPS-QKD .”
Modes and states in quantum optics (2019, methodology): “Laguerre-Gauss modes, carrying orbital angular momentum, are used in quantum information processing, in particular in Quantum Key Distribution context (Mirhosseini et al., 2015);”