Experimental verification of the feasibility of a quantum channel between space and Earth

By Paolo Villoresi, T. Jennewein, Fabrizio Tamburini, Markus Aspelmeyer, Cristian Bonato, Rupert Ursin, C. Pernechele, V. Luceri, G. Bianco, Anton Zeilinger and 1 more. 2008

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Extending quantum communication to space environments would enable us to perform fundamental experiments on quantum physics as well as applications of quantum information at planetary and interplanetary scales. Here, we report on the first experimental study of the conditions for the implementation of the single-photon exchange between a satellite and an Earth-based station. We built an experiment that mimics a single photon source on a satellite, exploiting the telescope at the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory of the Italian Space Agency to detect the transmitted photons. Weak laser pulses, emitted by the ground-based station, are directed toward a satellite equipped with cube-corner retroreflectors. These reflect a small portion of the pulse, with an average of less-than-one photon per pulse directed to our receiver, as required for faint-pulse quantum communication. We were able to detect returns from satellite Ajisai, a low-Earth orbit geodetic satellite, whose orbit has a perigee height of 1485 km.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9dbe2d55272a3dec34c0ecb3601a65cf0c779892

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Satellite-to-ground quantum-limited communication using a 50-kg-class microsatellite (2017, background): “There have been significant efforts on developing the basic technologies for QKD in space, namely, terrestrial free-space quantum-communications [11,12-14], demonstrations with moving terminals to emulate the motion of a satellite [15,16], experiments using orbiting objects such as passive corner-re”
Advances in quantum cryptography (2019, unknown): “These were illuminated by a train of pulses from the Matera Laser Ranging Observatory (MLRO, Italy) in such a way that a single photon was reflected on average by the satellite [335].”
Quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optics (2009, background): “There are several feasibility studies, both theoretical (Bonato et al., 2009; Villoresi et al., 2004) and experimental (Peng et al., 2005; Villoresi et al., 2008).”
Feasibility of satellite quantum key distribution (2009, background): “In particular, we concentrate on two issues that were identified as crucial by the experiment performed at Matera Observatory [14]: the possibility of a good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the polarization mainteinance in the link.”
Quantum teleportation over 143 kilometres using active feed-forward (2012, background): “To enable quantum communication on a global scale and among parties not having access to any fibre network, it is foreseeable that experiments will involve ground-to-satellite 10,11,15 and inter-satellite links.”
Complete experimental toolbox for alignment-free quantum communication (2012, methodology): “We now generalize the results given in [5] [equations (14)-(17)], obtaining the following expression for the transformation coefficients representing the combined effect of beam tilt and displacement on LG beam having p = p′ = 0 and m = m′ = ±1:”