Practical free-space quantum key distribution over 10 km in daylight and at night

By Richard J. Hughes, J. Nordholt, D. Derkacs, C. G. Peterson. 2002

507 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have demonstrated quantum key distribution (QKD) (Bennett C H and Brassard G 1984 Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Computers, Systems, and Signal Processing (Bangalore, India) p 175) over a 10 km, 1-airmass atmospheric range during daylight and at night. Secret random bit sequences of the quality required for the cryptographic keys used to initialize secure communications devices were transferred at practical rates with realistic security. By identifying the physical parameters that determine the system's secrecy efficiency, we infer that free-space QKD will be practical over much longer ranges under these and other atmospheric and instrumental conditions.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4028b22bf72101748fc4f29e59b1a99425872621

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

The security of practical quantum key distribution (2008, background): “Free-space QKD has been demonstrated in both the prepare-andmeasure (Buttler et al., 1998; Hughes et al., 2002; Kurtsiefer et al., 2002; Rarity, Gorman and Tapster, 2001) and the entanglement-based configurations (Erven et al., 2008; Ling et al., 2008; Marcikic, Lamas-Linares and Kurtsiefer, 2006;…”
Experimental open-air quantum key distribution with a single-photon source (2004, background): “Interest in experimental QKD has evolved from early proof-o f-principle experiments [4, 5] to long distance demonstrations on optical fibers [6, 7 ] as well as in free space [8, 9, 10] and now to commercial products [11, 12].”
Long-distance quantum communication with entangled photons using satellites (2003, background): “[25] R.”
Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometres using active feed-forward (2012, background): “links [8–16], which potentially allow much larger propagation distances compared to the existing fiber networks because of the lower photon loss per kilometer.”
Relay-Assisted Free-Space Optical Communication (2007, background): “In free-space QKD systems, this performance limitation is due to absorption, scattering, diffraction, and turbulence degradation experienced in atmospheric channels [64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69].”