Self-referenced continuous-variable quantum key distribution protocol

By Daniel Soh, Constantin Brif, Patrick J. Coles, Norbert Lutkenhaus, R. Camacho, J. Urayama, Mohan Sarovar. 2015

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce a new continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) protocol, self-referenced CV-QKD, that eliminates the need for transmission of a high-power local oscillator between the communicating parties. In this protocol, each signal pulse is accompanied by a reference pulse (or a pair of twin reference pulses), used to align Alice's and Bob's measurement bases. The method of phase estimation and compensation based on the reference pulse measurement can be viewed as a quantum analog of intradyne detection used in classical coherent communication, which extracts the phase information from the modulated signal. We present a proof-of-principle, fiber-based experimental demonstration of the protocol and quantify the expected secret key rates by expressing them in terms of experimental parameters. Our analysis of the secret key rate fully takes into account the inherent uncertainty associated with the quantum nature of the reference pulse(s) and quantifies the limit at which the theoretical key rate approaches that of the respective conventional protocol that requires local oscillator transmission. The self-referenced protocol greatly simplifies the hardware required for CV-QKD, especially for potential integrated photonics implementations of transmitters and receivers, with minimum sacrifice of performance. As such, it provides a pathway towards scalable integrated CV-QKD transceivers, a vital step towards large-scale QKD networks.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a8aa51ddacf11a15c09c8f31db2d1ad8993c187

How researchers see this paper

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In Artificial Intelligence

1. Eleni Diamanti
2. Pei Zeng
3. Hongyi Zhou
4. Anthony Leverrier
5. Xiongfeng Ma
6. Hoi-Kwong Lo
7. Bing Qi

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Anthony Leverrier
2. Xiongfeng Ma

Citations in the corpus

• Phase-Matching Quantum Key Distribution (2018, background): “Note that similar ideas of phase postcompensation and phase calibration have already been adopted in some continuous-variable QKD protocols, such as the Gaussian-modulated coherent-state protocol [30, 31] and the self-referenced protocol [32].”
• Distributing Secret Keys with Quantum Continuous Variables: Principle, Security and Implementations (2015, background): “Recent preliminary theoretical and experimental studies of a scheme that does not require the transfer of the local oscillator are promising [79,80], and further advances in this direction are likely to lead to important simplifications of practical CVQKD implementations.”