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arXiv:2508.14857 · Physical Review Research

Single-click protocols for remote state preparation using weak coherent pulses

Janice van Dam, Emil R. Hellebek, Tzula B. Propp, Junior R. Gonzales-Ureta, Anders Søndberg Sørensen, Stephanie Wehner

Published Jul 24, 2026• 0 citations

Abstract

Remote state preparation (RSP) allows one party to remotely prepare a known quantum state on another party's qubit using entanglement. This can be used in quantum networks to perform applications such as blind quantum computing or long-distance quantum key distribution (QKD) with quantum repeaters. Devices to perform RSP, referred to as a client, ideally have low hardware requirements, such as only sending photonic qubits. A weak coherent pulse source offers a practical alternative to true single-photon sources and is already widely used in QKD. Here, we introduce two protocols to the previously known protocol for RSP with a weak-coherent-pulse-based device. The known technique uses a double-click (DC) protocol, where a photon from both the server and the client needs to reach an intermediate Bell state measurement. Here, we add to that a single-click (SC) RSP protocol, which requires only one photon to reach the Bell state measurement, allowing for better performance in certain regimes. In addition, we introduce a double-single-click (DSC) protocol, where the SC protocol is repeated twice, and a gate is applied between the resulting qubits. DSC mitigates the need for phase stabilization in certain regimes, lowering technical complexity while still improving performance compared to DC in some regimes. We compare these protocols in terms of fidelity and rate, finding that SC consistently achieves higher rates than DC and, interestingly, does not suffer from an inherently lower fidelity than DC, as is the case for entanglement generation. Although SC provides stronger performance, DSC can still show performance improvements over DC, and it may have reduced technical complexity compared to SC. Finally, we show how these protocols can be used in long-distance QKD using quantum repeaters.

DOI: 10.1103/x1nr-qbz7

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Remote state preparation (RSP) is a central primitive in quantum cryptography, enabling classical parties to remotely construct quantum states using only classical communication. As a result, RSP serves as a key building block in numerous protocols involving classical clients and quantum servers, allowing classical parties to leverage the advantages offered by powerful quantum computers. All known constructions of RSP rely on strong cryptographic assumptions, typically variants of trapdoor claw-free functions (TCFs). In this work, we initiate the study of a weaker form of remote state preparation, which we call eavesdropper-blind remote state preparation (EB-RSP). Informally, EB-RSP requires blindness only against external observers who see the transcript of the honest protocol, rather than against the quantum server itself. Despite this relaxed adversarial model, the resulting notion remains sufficient for useful cryptographic applications. In particular, we show that two-message EB-RSP already suffices to construct quantum public-key encryption with classical public keys and quantum ciphertexts. We then construct two-message EB-RSP protocols from specific one-way group actions, yielding a first step toward RSP-type primitives based on assumptions that do not rely on trapdoors. Finally, we observe that existing RSP constructions are likely naturally adaptable to the two-message EB-RSP notion; we demonstrate this explicitly for a concrete TCF-based RSP construction.

A single photon in a superposition of

d

modes naturally encode a

d

-dimensional quantum system, a so-called qudit. We show that such superpositions can be leveraged to achieve a quantum speed-up of remote remote state preparation (RSP): a primitive for several quantum network protocols. For a superposition over

d\geq 2

modes, the photon state can encode up to

{\rm Log}_2(d)

qubits, which we exploit in a proposed reflection based RSP protocol with multiple variations. For single qubit RSP, we achieve a performance comparable to the best known existing schemes but with reduced requirements for phase stabilization. For many qubit RSP the achievable success rates remain high despite needing exponentially many temporal modes, since only one photon needs to be transmitted and detected to prepare multiple qubits. By simultaneously preparing many qubits at once, we bypass limited qubit lifetimes limited qubit lifetimes and improve fidelities beyond what is achievable with existing RSP protocols.

The universal blind quantum computation (UBQC) protocol [A. Broadbent, J. Fitzsimons, and E. Kashefi, in Proceedings of the 50th Annual IEEE Symposiumon Foundations of Computer Science (IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA, 2009), pp. 517-526.] allows a client to perform quantum computation on a remote server. In an ideal setting, perfect privacy is guaranteed if the client is capable of producing specific, randomly chosen single qubit states. While from a theoretical point of view, this may constitute the lowest possible quantum requirement, from a pragmatic point of view, generation of such states to be sent along long distances can never be achieved perfectly. We introduce the concept of ϵ blindness for UBQC, in analogy to the concept of ϵ security developed for other cryptographic protocols, allowing us to characterize the robustness and security properties of the protocol under possible imperfections. We also present a remote blind single qubit preparation protocol with weak coherent pulses for the client to prepare, in a delegated fashion, quantum states arbitrarily close to perfect random single qubit states. This allows us to efficiently achieve ϵ-blind UBQC for any ϵ>0, even if the channel between the client and the server is arbitrarily lossy.

Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) relies on entangled graph states, yet existing remote state preparation (RSP) protocols prepare only separable states, requiring subsequent entangling gates on the remote server. Here, we introduce Remote Graph State Preparation (RGSP), a framework that prepares arbitrary graph states directly from a single high-dimensional photonic qudit. By encoding multiple qubits and their graph connectivity into the photon's structured phase profile, RGSP can reduce or, for small computations, completely eliminate the need for server-side entangling operations among qubits. We show that under a reasonable noise model the resulting state fidelity is independent of the graph topology. Under cumulative fiber phase drift, we demonstrate that this fidelity is significantly enhanced by a ``highest-weight-first'' mode reordering strategy. Finally, we show that RGSP enables reduced-SWAP universal blind quantum computing on arbitrary topologies, reducing qubit overhead e.g., for a six-qubit Quantum Fourier Transform from

420

RSP qubits with a standard brickwork topology to

48

RSP qubits. These results establish RGSP as a resource-efficient, topology-invariant primitive for quantum-secured cloud computing.

In this paper, we study the Universal Blind Quantum Computing (UBQC) protocol, which allows a client to perform quantum computation on a remote quantum server and the Remote Blind qubit state Preparation (RBSP) protocol which allows the client to prepare single qubits on the server's location with week coherent pulses. This RBSP protocol is inefficient for small $ T $, because the required number of pulses for generating one single qubit scales as $ \mbox{O}(1/T^4) $, where $ T $ is the transmittance of the quantum channe between the client and the server. Our contribution in this paper is a modified RBSP protocol with decoy states. This new protocol allows us to generate $ S $ single qubits simultaneously in a single instance. With our new rotocol, we are able to reduce the number of weak coherent pulses required for generating one single qubit from $ \mbox{O}(1/T^4) $ to nearly $ \mbox{O}(1/T) $, significantly increasing the efficiency. For a 100 km standard telecom fiber of loss 0.2 dB/km, our method gives a six orders of magnitude improvement in the speed, which is very significant.

We study the quantum communication protocol of remote state preparation (RSP) for pure states of qubits encoded in single photons transmitted through a double slit, the so-called spatial qubits. Two measurement strategies that one can adopt to remotely prepare the states are discussed. The first strategy is the well-known spatial postselection, where a single-pixel detector measures the transverse position of the photon between the focal and the image plane of a lens. The second strategy, proposed by ourselves, is a generalized measurement divided into two steps: the implementation of a two-outcome positive operator-valued measurement (POVM) followed by the spatial postselection at the focal plane of the lens by a two-pixel detector in each output of the POVM. In both cases we analyze the effects of the finite spatial resolution of the detectors over three figures of merit of the protocol, namely, the probability of preparation, the fidelity, and purity of the remotely prepared states. It is shown that our strategy improves these figures compared with spatial postselection, at the expense of increasing the classical communication cost as well as the required experimental resources. In addition, we present a modified version of our strategy for RSP of spatial qudits which is able to prepare arbitrary pure states, unlike spatial postselection alone. We expect that our study may also be extended for RSP of the angular spectrum of a single-photon field as an alternative for quantum teleportation which requires very inefficient nonlinear interactions.