Continuous‐Variable Quantum Key Distribution with Gaussian Modulation—The Theory of Practical Implementations

By Fabian Laudenbach, Christoph Pacher, Chi-Hang Fred Fung, Andreas Poppe, Momtchil Peev, Bernhard Schrenk, Michael Hentschel, Philip Walther, Hannes Hübel. Advanced Quantum Technologies, 2017

422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) using weak coherent states and homodyne detection is a promising candidate for practical quantum‐cryptographic implementations due to its compatibility with existing telecom equipment and high detection efficiencies. However, despite the actual simplicity of the protocol, the security analysis of this method is rather involved compared to discrete‐variable QKD. This article reviews the theoretical foundations of continuous‐variable quantum key distribution (CV‐QKD) with Gaussian modulation and rederives the essential relations from scratch in a pedagogical way. The aim of this paper is to be as comprehensive and self‐contained as possible in order to be well intelligible even for readers with little pre‐knowledge on the subject. Although the present article is a theoretical discussion of CV‐QKD, its focus lies on practical implementations, taking into account various kinds of hardware imperfections and suggesting practical methods to perform the security analysis subsequent to the key exchange. Apart from a review of well‐known results, this manuscript presents a set of new original noise models which are helpful to get an estimate of how well a given set of hardware will perform in practice.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74c93e328a01f3c8cfffd499d4c7e46c9889af60

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Citations in the corpus

Secure quantum key distribution with realistic devices (2020, background): “…cover too much on some important topics, but we refer the readers to other review articles on the topics of CV-QKD (Diamanti and Leverrier, 2015; Laudenbach et al., 2018; Weedbrook et al., 2012), highdimensional QKD (Xavier and Lima, 2020), quantum repeaters (Munro et al., 2015; Pan et al.,…”
Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, positive): “Specifically, the scheme based on Gaussian modulation of coherent states and homodyne detection has matured over the last 15 years from a simple laboratory demonstration based on bulk optical components creating keys with very low bandwidth [455–458] to a robust telecombased system that generates ke”