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arXiv:2601.20991 · Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Active polarization stabilization of fields in an optical fiber for protective measurements

E. Pascoe, A. Catalan, J. Sharkansky, M. Beck

quant-phSubmitted Jan 28, 2026• Announced Jan 30, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

We have performed Zeno protective measurements of quantum polarization states by coupling the polarization to a temporal pointer (arrival time) in a birefringent optical fiber. It is necessary to actively stabilize the polarization, and we do this by using the signal photon counts themselves as the error signal in a feedback loop. We compare these measurements to a stabilization scheme using a classical reference beam as the error signal. The method using photon counts has higher signal levels and significantly reduced background. These improvements allow us to increase the number of Zeno stages in our measurements from 9 to 13, with a corresponding decrease in the measurement uncertainty.

Journal reference
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 43, 462-469 (2026)
DOI
10.48550/arXiv.2601.20991
Comments
13 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

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We have performed Zeno protective measurements of quantum polarization states by coupling the polarization to a temporal pointer (arrival time) in a birefringent optical fiber. It is necessary to actively stabilize the polarization, and we do this by using the signal photon counts themselves as the error signal in a feedback loop. We compare these measurements to a stabilization scheme using a classical reference beam as the error signal. The method using photon counts has higher signal levels and significantly reduced background. These improvements allow us to increase the number of Zeno stages in our measurements from 9 to 13, with a corresponding decrease in the measurement uncertainty.
We experimentally demonstrate protective measurements by weakly coupling the polarization of a single-photon-level field to a measurement pointer that corresponds to the arrival time of the photon. By using an optical loop, we implement a variable, controlled number (1--9) of protection and measurement stages. We demonstrate the measurement of expectation values of photon polarization by measuring arrival times while simultaneously protecting the polarization state. No knowledge of the initial photon state is required or available in our experiment, demonstrating that protective measurements provide a genuine information gain that cannot simply be reduced to a priori information about the protection procedure.
This paper presents a proof-of-principle scheme for the protective measurement of a single photon. In this scheme, the photon is looped arbitrarily many times through an optical stage that implements a weak measurement of a polarization observable followed by a strong measurement protecting the state. The ability of this scheme to realize a large number of such interaction-protection steps means that the uncertainty in the measurement result can be drastically reduced while maintaining a sufficient probability for the photon to survive the measurement.
Polarization qubits offer a direct route to fiber-based quantum communication, yet the fiber that carries them also scrambles their reference frame through uncontrolled birefringence. Active compensation commonly relies on monitoring and feedback, raising a natural question: can the link itself suppress coherent polarization drift before it reaches the receiver? We show that it can within a regime of sufficiently correlated unitary drift. Our central idea is to embed a fixed cyclic sequence of Pauli rotations along the fiber, turning propagation distance into a spatial toggling frame. Rather than estimating and inverting the unknown transformation, the sequence repeatedly reverses its leading action. We establish exact refocusing for constant generators compatible with a two-segment echo, show that a four-frame Pauli cell cancels the leading contribution of any traceless quasi-static generator, and bound the residual error for smoothly varying birefringence. We then connect these guarantees to operational BB84 quantities, including measured QBERs, the resulting secret fraction, and insertion loss. In simulations of a 50 km fiber with spatially correlated birefringence, a representative design reduces the mean QBER from 6.11% to 0.224% at a device spacing of 1.25 km. With an assumed per-device transmission of t = 0.997, this raises the asymptotic key rate per launched pulse by a factor of approximately 2.5. For this parameter set, the best design in the tested scan is not the densest one: error suppression and optical loss create a finite operating window. These results provide a loss-aware design principle for passive polarization stabilization and suggest a low-overhead complement to active tracking in polarization-encoded QKD networks.
Quantum measurements that use the entangled photons' polarization to encode quantum information require calibration and alignment of the measurement bases between spatially separate observers. Because of the changing birefringence in optical fibers arising from temperature fluctuations or external mechanical vibrations, the polarization state at the end of a fiber channel is unpredictable and time-varying. Polarization tracking and stabilization methods originally developed for classical optical communications cannot be applied to polarization-entangled photons, where the separately detected photons are statistically unpolarized, yet quantum mechanically correlated. We report here a fast method for automatic alignment and dynamic tracking of the polarization measurement bases between spatially separated detectors. The system uses the Nelder-Mead simplex method to minimize the observed coincidence rate between non-locally measured entangled photon pairs, without relying on classical wavelength-multiplexed pilot tones or temporally interleaved polarized photons. Alignment and control is demonstrated in a 7.1 km deployed fiber loop as well as in a controlled drifting scenario.
Quantum sensing has performance advantages that far exceed classical sensing, where sensing with photons is one of the most useful branches, and fiberization is a significant development approach to achieve a broader range of applications. However, the birefringence effect in optical fibers can cause polarization drift, which severely reduces the sensitivity of measurement on weak signals and influences the development of quantum sensing. In order to solve this problem, we propose a scheme that builds four time-division-multiplexing channels in the system by switching the polarization states of different optical pulses, and achieves the effect of suppressing polarization drift by analyzing and integrating the effective information of the four polarization channels. Moreover, the sensitivity and linear dynamic range of the system can be adjusted by inserting a reference phase. We demonstrate the feasibility of the system via theoretical analysis, and the numerical simulation results show that the scheme can demodulate the signal well and improve the signal-to-noise ratio by 30 dB, even in the case of the signal of the direct demodulation method is drowned out by noise and completely distorted.
We perform a transmission of polarization encoded quantum bits through 16 km of single mode optical fiber in the 1550 nm window.The polarization drift caused by the changing birefringence of the fiber is kept stable through the use of a polarization control system we developed.This system employs 2 classical reference signals with 0.8 nm spacing from the quantum channel.We also send through the same fiber an extra reference classical signal used to trigger the single-photon detector.To the best of our knowledge this is the first time a quantum channel is multiplexed with 3 classical signals in the same optical fiber.