Quantum information science breaks limitations of conventional information transfer, cryptography and computation by using quantum superpositions or entanglement as resources for information processing. Here we report on the experimental realisation of three-party quantum communication protocols using single three-level quantum system (qutrit) communication: secret-sharing, detectable Byzantine agreement and communication complexity reduction for a three-valued function. We have implemented these three schemes using the same optical fibre interferometric setup. Our realisation is easily scalable without compromising on detection efficiency or generating extremely complex many-particle entangled states. Quantum-mechanically secure communication between three different parties has been achieved by researchers in Sweden. Mohamed Bourennane and colleagues at Stockholm University achieved this by sharing a three-state quantum object across an optical fiber network. Quantum cryptography takes advantage of the unusual properties of quantum particles to achieve a degree of security beyond that possible in any classical communication system. Often this relies on linking two particles through a quantum mechanical connection known as entanglement; however, entanglement can be difficult to create. The scheme used by Bourennane's team uses just a single quantum object known as a qutrit that can exist in one of three states. The team demonstrated three different protocols known as secret sharing, detectable Byzantine agreement and communication complexity reduction. The method shows potential for scaling up to large-scale applications.
Quantum information science breaks limitations of conventional information transfer, cryptography and computation by using quantum superpositions or entanglement as resources for information processing. Here we report on the experimental realisation of three-party quantum communication protocols using single three-level quantum system (qutrit) communication: secret-sharing, detectable Byzantine agreement and communication complexity reduction for a three-valued function. We have implemented these three schemes using the same optical fibre interferometric setup. Our realisation is easily scalable without compromising on detection efficiency or generating extremely complex many-particle entangled states. Quantum-mechanically secure communication between three different parties has been achieved by researchers in Sweden. Mohamed Bourennane and colleagues at Stockholm University achieved this by sharing a three-state quantum object across an optical fiber network. Quantum cryptography takes advantage of the unusual properties of quantum particles to achieve a degree of security beyond that possible in any classical communication system. Often this relies on linking two particles through a quantum mechanical connection known as entanglement; however, entanglement can be difficult to create. The scheme used by Bourennane's team uses just a single quantum object known as a qutrit that can exist in one of three states. The team demonstrated three different protocols known as secret sharing, detectable Byzantine agreement and communication complexity reduction. The method shows potential for scaling up to large-scale applications.
We report quantum secret sharing experiment in telecommunication fiber in five-party implementation. The quantum secret sharing experiment has been based on a single qubit protocol, which has opened the door to practical secret sharing implementation over fiber channels and in free space. The previous quantum secret sharing proposals were based on multiparticle entangled states, difficult in the practical implementation and not scalable. The secret sharing protocol has been implemented in an interferometric fiber optics setup with phase encoding and demonstrated for three, four, and five parties. The experimental setup measurements have shown feasibility and scalability of secure multiparty quantum communication over commercial telecom fiber networks.
Abstract We consider two simple and practical protocols for multiparty communication and show their experimental realization. These protocols deal with the task of secret sharing in which a secret message is split among several parties in a way that its reconstruction requires their mutual collaboration. In the presented schemes the parties solve the problem by two different approaches: The first uses as a resource the multiqubit entangled state |Π4‐〉. As no interferometric setups are required here, contrary to known schemes, involving Greenberger‐Horne‐Zeilinger states, its implementation is simpler and more stable. In the second scheme only sequential transformations on a single qubit are used. This further tremendously simplifies the method, makes it scalable with regard to the number of participating partners and above all, technologically comparable to quantum key distribution.
We give an example of a wide class of problems for which quantum-information protocols based on multisystem entanglement can be mapped into much simpler ones involving one system. Secret sharing is a cryptographic primitive which plays a central role in various secure multiparty computation tasks and management of keys in cryptography. In secret sharing protocols, a classical message is divided into shares given to recipient parties in such a way that some number of parties need to collaborate in order to reconstruct the message. Quantum protocols for the task commonly rely on multipartite GHZ entanglement. We present a multiparty secret sharing protocol which requires only sequential communication of a single quantum d-level system (for any prime d). It has huge advantages in scalability and can be realized with state-of-the-art technology.
Current communication networks are based on classical physics and classical information-processing. However, for nearly a century, we have known that at its most fundamental level, the universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics. With quantum communication, new possibilities arise in our capabilities to transmit and process information which, in many cases, lead to advantages compared to what is classically possible. The entire scope of tasks for which quantum communication can offer improvements has not yet been fully explored, but several quantum protocols are known that can either perform tasks which are impossible with classical resources or can outperform classical protocols. These quantum protocols are well understood from a theoretical point of view, but many of them have never been demonstrated in practice. Thus, in the context of quantum communication, there is a significant gap between theory and experiment that must be removed in order to harness the advantages provided by quantum mechanics in a practical setting. \n \nIn this thesis, we develop a series of tools for developing and testing practical quantum communication protocols. Our main technique is a theoretical reformulation of existing quantum communication protocols that converts them into a form in which they can be demonstrated with existing experimental techniques. More precisely, they can be implemented using only coherent states of light and linear optics circuits while still retaining the crucial properties of the original abstract protocols. We use this result to construct practical protocols for the Hidden Matching problem and quantum fingerprinting. \n \n \nIn the case of quantum fingerprinting, we make a thorough analysis of the role played by experimental errors and show that our practical protocol can still be implemented in the presence of these imperfections. In fact, we report a proof of concept experimental demonstration of a quantum fingerprinting system that is capable of transmitting less information than the best known classical protocol for this problem. Our implementation is based on a modified version of a commercial quantum key distribution system using off-the-shelf optical components over telecom wavelengths, and is practical for messages as large as 100 Mbits, even in the presence of experimental imperfections. \n \nSimilarly, in the context of cryptography, we propose a multiparty quantum signature protocol that can be implemented from any point-to-point quantum key distribution network, proving its security against forging, repudiation and non-transferability. Crucially, since quantum key distribution is already a practical technology, so is this protocol. However, unlike other tasks in quantum communication, there has not been significant theoretical work on establishing a security model for quantum signature schemes. Consequently, we also constructed a security framework for these schemes and proved several properties that these protocols must satisfy in order to achieve their security goals. \n \nFinally, in addition to proposing new practical protocols, we provide a reliable data analysis technique to verify an important property of many quantum communication protocols: the presence of entanglement. Our technique is based on entanglement witnesses and it does not require the specification of a prior distribution nor the assumption of independent measurements. The technique is suitable to be used with nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which we show can be constructed from any linear witness and evaluated from the same experimental data. We also develop numerical tools necessary to employ this approach in practice, rendering the procedure ready to be applied to current experiments. We demonstrate this by analyzing the data of a photonic experiment generating two-photon states whose entanglement is verified with the use of an accessible nonlinear witness.
Quantum mechanics provides several methods to generate and securely distribute private lists of numbers suitably correlated to solve the Three Byzantine Generals Problem. So far, these methods are based on three-qutrit singlet states, four-qubit entangled states, and three or two pairwise quantum key distribution channels. Here we show that the problem can be solved using a single qutrit. This scheme presents some advantages over previous schemes, and emphasizes the specific role of qutrits in basic quantum information processing.
We are currently experiencing a rapid development of quantum information, a new branch of science, being an interdisciplinary of quantum physics, information theory, telecommunications, computer science, and many others. This new science branch was born in the middle of the eighties, developed rapidly during the nineties, and in the current decade has brought a technological breakthrough in creating secure quantum key distribution (QKD), quantum secret sharing, and exciting promises in diverse technological fields. Recent QKD experiments have achieved high rate QKD at 200 km distance in optical fiber. Significant QKD results have also been achieved in free-space. Due to the rapid broadband access deployment in many industrialized countries and the standing increasing transmission security treats, the natural development awaiting quantum communications, being a part of quantum information, is its migration into commercial switched telecom networks. Such a migration concerns both multiuser quantum key distribution and multiparty quantum secret sharing that have been the main goal of my PhD studies. They are also the main concern of the thesis. Our research efforts in multiuser QKD has led to a development of the five-user setup for transmissions over switched fiber networks in a star and in a tree configuration. We have achieved longer secure quantum information distances and implemented more nodes than other multi-user QKD experiments. The measurements have shown feasibility of multiuser QKD over switched fiber networks, using standard fiber telecom components. Since circular architecture networks are important parts of both intranets and the Internet, Sagnac QKD has also been a subject of our research efforts. The published experiments in this area have been very few and results were not encouraging, mainly due to the single mode fiber (SMF) birefringence. Our research has led to a development of a computer controlled birefringence compensation in Sagnac that open the door to both classical and quantum Sagnac applications. On the quantum secret sharing side, we have achieved the first quantum secret sharing experiment over telecom fiber in a five-party implementation using the "plug & play" setup and in a four-party implementation using Sagnac configuration. The setup measurements have shown feasibility and scalability of multiparty quantum communication over commercial telecom fiber networks.