Satellite-Relayed Intercontinental Quantum Network.

By Shengkai Liao, Wenqi Cai, J. Handsteiner, Bo Liu, Juan Yin, Liang Zhang, D. Rauch, Matthias Fink, Ji-Gang Ren, Weiyue Liu and 26 more. Physical Review Letters, 2018

655 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We perform decoy-state quantum key distribution between a low-Earth-orbit satellite and multiple ground stations located in Xinglong, Nanshan, and Graz, which establish satellite-to-ground secure keys with ∼kHz rate per passage of the satellite Micius over a ground station. The satellite thus establishes a secure key between itself and, say, Xinglong, and another key between itself and, say, Graz. Then, upon request from the ground command, Micius acts as a trusted relay. It performs bitwise exclusive or operations between the two keys and relays the result to one of the ground stations. That way, a secret key is created between China and Europe at locations separated by 7600 km on Earth. These keys are then used for intercontinental quantum-secured communication. This was, on the one hand, the transmission of images in a one-time pad configuration from China to Austria as well as from Austria to China. Also, a video conference was performed between the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which also included a 280 km optical ground connection between Xinglong and Beijing. Our work clearly confirms the Micius satellite as a robust platform for quantum key distribution with different ground stations on Earth, and points towards an efficient solution for an ultralong-distance global quantum network.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52ca7778fa2e4ce946e703812c3c682bd991a9e4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, background): “After more than two decades of efforts (Gisin et al., 2002; Lo et al., 2014), QKD developments include the first laboratory demonstration performed in 1992 over 32.5-cm free space (Bennett et al., 1992a), to the recent landmark accomplishment of quantum satellite QKD experiment in 2017 over 1200 km ”
A device-independent quantum key distribution system for distant users (2021, methodology): “The technology is now well established in a wide variety of network settings [3–12] and commercial QKD systems are available as well.”
Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, neutral): “[347] S.”
Development of Quantum Interconnects (QuICs) for Next-Generation Information Technologies (2021, background): “While the achieved transmission rates in these experiments might have greatly exceeded what would have been possible using fiber channels—in one case by nearly 20 orders of magnitude [60], [61], they are still often very low, and methods such as multiplexing or employing higher-dimensional states (”