Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

arXiv:2603.18212 · Science Advances

High-dimensional quantum communication with scalable photonic entanglement in time and frequency

Kai-Chi Chang, Murat Can Sarihan, Nicky Kai Hong Li, Florian Kanitschar, Kemal Enes Akyuz, Yujie Chen, Dong-Il Lee, Jin Ho Kang, Alwaleed Aldhafeeri, Andrew Mueller, Matthew D. Shaw, Boris Korzh, Maria Spiropulu, Paul Erker, Marcus Huber, Chee Wei Wong

quant-phphysics.opticsSubmitted Mar 18, 2026• Announced Mar 20, 2026• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

High-dimensional photonic entanglement holds significant promise for advancing quantum communication, computation, and metrology. For example, large-alphabet quantum communication protocols are known to benefit from enhanced noise resilience and information capacity via multi-bit time-bin encoding. Yet, characterizing high-dimensional entangled states is challenging, as full state tomography becomes prohibitively costly and often requires unrealizable measurements. Here, we demonstrate a scan-free method to characterize high-dimensional entanglement in the time-frequency domain. Our reconstruction achieves a record $5.70\pm0.07$ ebits and a fidelity of $65.4\pm0.4\%$ with the maximally entangled state of local dimension $1021$, certifying the presence of $668$-dimensional entanglement. We further prove the attainability of a secure key rate of $15.6$ kB/s in a composable finite-size, entanglement-based protocol, and show that in continuous operation, the setup can quickly approach asymptotic key rates. Using commercial telecom components and state-of-the-art low-jitter single-photon detectors, our scalable architecture offers a practical path towards high-rate, noise-resilient quantum communication testbeds.

Journal reference
Sci. Adv.12,eaee1333(2026)
DOI
10.1126/sciadv.aee1333
Comments
19+20 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables

Related papers

Detecting high-dimensional time-bin entanglement in fiber-loop systems

Niklas Euler, Monika Monika, Ulf Peschel +1 more

Many quantum communication protocols rely on the distribution of entanglement between the different participating parties. One example is quantum key distribution (QKD), an application that has matured to commercial use in recent years. However, difficulties remain, especially with noise resilience and channel capacity in long-distance communication. One way to overcome these problems is to use high-dimensional entanglement, which has been shown to be more robust to noise and enables higher secret-key rates. It is therefore important to have access to certifiable high-dimensional entanglement sources to confidently implement these advanced QKD protocols. Here we develop a method for certifying high-dimensional time-bin entanglement in fiber-loop systems. In these systems, entanglement creation and detection can utilize the same physical components, and the number of time bins, and thus the entanglement dimension, can be adapted without making physical changes to the setup. Our certification method builds on previous proposals for the certification of angular-momentum entanglement in photon pairs. In particular, measurements in only two experimentally accessible bases are sufficient to obtain a lower bound on the entanglement dimension for both two- and multiphoton quantum states. Numerical simulations show that the method is robust against typical experimental noise effects and works well even with limited measurement statistics, thus establishing time-bin encoded photons as a promising platform for high-dimensional quantum-communication protocols.

arXiv:2502.18336•Physical Review A•Jun 17, 2025•2 citations

Robust Approach for Time-Bin-Encoded Photonic Quantum Information Protocols

Simon White, Emanuele Polino, Farzad Ghafari +6 more

Quantum states encoded in the time-bin degree of freedom of photons represent a fundamental resource for quantum information protocols. Traditional methods for generating and measuring time-bin-encoded quantum states face severe challenges due to optical instabilities, complex setups, and timing resolution requirements. To circumvent these issues, we leverage an approach based on Hong-Ou-Mandel interference and we propose and demonstrate a robust and scalable protocol to generate and measure arbitrary high-dimensional time-bin quantum states. We experimentally implement the protocol in a photonic setup reaching high-fidelity quantum state tomographies of two- and three-dimensional quantum states encoded in time bins with short temporal separation. We also certify intrasystem polarization-time entanglement of single photons through a nonclassicality test. The demonstrated approach enables access to high-dimensional states and tasks that are practically inaccessible with standard schemes, thereby advancing fundamental quantum information science and opening applications in quantum communication.

arXiv:2404.16106•Physical Review Letters•May 6, 2025•12 citations

High-dimensional Quantum Networks: deploying the frequency and time modalities

Kemal Enes Akyuz, Kai-Chi Chang, Murat Can Sarihan +5 more

Quantum networks enable fundamentally secure communications and entanglement distribution in parallelized quantum computation. Here we describe our high-dimensional quantum network based on frequency-multiplexed time-bin encoding. Our multi-user 21-km experimental testbed is designed for robustness and scalability, with frequency- and temporal-multiplexing for high-rate interconnects while preserving minimal resource usage and multi-party access through simultaneous key or entanglement distribution. Our measurements are in the high-dimensional frequency and temporal conjugate subspaces, via our biphoton frequency comb qudit. Non-local Franson interferometry provide a measured lower-bound of our entanglement-of-formation, and the Schmidt mode decomposition provide an estimate of the accessible quantum information. We highlight adaptive optimization and singly-filtered biphoton combs as a practical architecture in our high-rate quantum network testbed. We describe the photon information efficiency, Shannon capacity, entanglement distribution, raw key rates, security measurements, dispersive bases, code-efficient non-binary error correction, and Holevo bounds embedded in our network.

Quantum Computing, Communication, and Simulation•Mar 5, 2026•0 citations

High-Dimensional Pixel Entanglement: Efficient Generation and Certification

Natalia Herrera Valencia, Vatshal Srivastav, Matej Pivoluska +4 more

Photons offer the potential to carry large amounts of information in their spectral, spatial, and polarisation degrees of freedom. While state-of-the-art classical communication systems routinely aim to maximize this information-carrying capacity via wavelength and spatial-mode division multiplexing, quantum systems based on multi-mode entanglement usually suffer from low state quality, long measurement times, and limited encoding capacity. At the same time, entanglement certification methods often rely on assumptions that compromise security. Here we show the certification of photonic high-dimensional entanglement in the transverse position-momentum degree-of-freedom with a record quality, measurement speed, and entanglement dimensionality, without making any assumptions about the state or channels. Using a tailored macro-pixel basis, precise spatial-mode measurements, and a modified entanglement witness, we demonstrate state fidelities of up to 94.4% in a 19-dimensional state-space, entanglement in up to 55 local dimensions, and an entanglement-of-formation of up to 4 ebits. Furthermore, our measurement times show an improvement of more than two orders of magnitude over previous state-of-the-art demonstrations. Our results pave the way for noise-robust quantum networks that saturate the information-carrying capacity of single photons.

arXiv:2004.04994•Quantum•Dec 24, 2020•121 citations

Experimental high-dimensional entanglement certification and quantum steering with time-energy measurements

Kai-Chi Chang, Murat Can Sarihan, Erker, Paul +8 more

High-dimensional entanglement provides unique ways of transcending the limitations of current approaches in quantum information processing, quantum communications based on qubits. The generation of time-frequency qudit states offer significantly increased quantum capacities while keeping the number of photons constant, but pose significant challenges regarding the possible measurements for certification of entanglement. Here, we develop a new scheme and experimentally demonstrate the certification of 24-dimensional entanglement and a 9-dimensional quantum steering. We then subject our photon-pairs to dispersion conditions equivalent to the transmission through 600-km of fiber and still certify 21-dimensional entanglement. Furthermore, we use a steering inequality to prove 7-dimensional entanglement in a semi-device independent manner, proving that large chromatic dispersion is not an obstacle in distributing and certifying high-dimensional entanglement and quantum steering. Our approach, leveraging intrinsic large-alphabet nature of telecom-band photons, enables scalable, commercially viable, and field-deployable entangled and steerable quantum sources, providing a pathway towards fully scalable quantum information processer and high-dimensional quantum communication networks.

arXiv:2310.20694•Oct 31, 2023•2 citations

648-Hilbert space dimensionality in biphoton frequency combs for quantum-secure communications and networks

Chee Wei Wong, Kai-Chi Chang, Xiang Cheng +1 more

High-dimensional entanglement with larger Hilbert spaces enable an encoding of more bits per photon and thus promise increased communication capacities over quantum channels. Quantum frequency combs, which are intrinsically multimode in the temporal and frequency degrees of freedom within a single spatial mode, naturally facilitating the generation and measurement of high-dimensional entanglement. Current challenges include the extension of well-known methods for two qubits to high-dimensional quantum systems and their application in entanglement experiments with photons. More specifically, the major challenge is the certification of high-dimensional entanglement by a number of accessible experimental measurements. In this paper, we increase the Hilbert space dimensionality and provide versatile tools for quantifying and certifying high-dimensional entanglement in a biphoton frequency comb. We quantify the time binned Schmidt number up to 18 and certify entanglement of formation with 1.89 ebits. We have demonstrated a 648- dimensional Hilbert spaces with time-frequency entanglement in a biphoton frequency comb, enabling a computational space up to 13 photonic qubits, and 6.28 bits/photon classical information capacity. This high-dimensional time frequency multimode quantum states of biphoton frequency comb significantly boosting the photon information capacity that is critical for large-scale quantum information processing. Biphoton frequency comb has indeed demonstrated an attractive and powerful approach towards achieving this fundamental goal with applications in high-dimensional quantum information processing, time-frequency cluster-state quantum computation, high-dimensional encoding in quantum networks, and high-dimensional quantum simulations.

AI and Optical Data Sciences•Mar 3, 2022•0 citations
High-dimensional photonic entanglement holds significant promise for advancing quantum communication, computation, and metrology. For example, large-alphabet quantum communication protocols are known to benefit from enhanced noise resilience and information capacity via multi-bit time-bin encoding. Yet, characterizing high-dimensional entangled states is challenging, as full state tomography becomes prohibitively costly and often requires unrealizable measurements. Here, we demonstrate a scan-free method to characterize high-dimensional entanglement in the time-frequency domain. Our reconstruction achieves a record 5.70±0.075.70\pm0.075.70±0.07 ebits and a fidelity of 65.4±0.4%65.4\pm0.4\%65.4±0.4% with the maximally entangled state of local dimension 102110211021, certifying the presence of 668668668-dimensional entanglement. We further prove the attainability of a secure key rate of 15.615.615.6 kB/s in a composable finite-size, entanglement-based protocol, and show that in continuous operation, the setup can quickly approach asymptotic key rates. Using commercial telecom components and state-of-the-art low-jitter single-photon detectors, our scalable architecture offers a practical path towards high-rate, noise-resilient quantum communication testbeds.
Many quantum communication protocols rely on the distribution of entanglement between the different participating parties. One example is quantum key distribution (QKD), an application that has matured to commercial use in recent years. However, difficulties remain, especially with noise resilience and channel capacity in long-distance communication. One way to overcome these problems is to use high-dimensional entanglement, which has been shown to be more robust to noise and enables higher secret-key rates. It is therefore important to have access to certifiable high-dimensional entanglement sources to confidently implement these advanced QKD protocols. Here we develop a method for certifying high-dimensional time-bin entanglement in fiber-loop systems. In these systems, entanglement creation and detection can utilize the same physical components, and the number of time bins, and thus the entanglement dimension, can be adapted without making physical changes to the setup. Our certification method builds on previous proposals for the certification of angular-momentum entanglement in photon pairs. In particular, measurements in only two experimentally accessible bases are sufficient to obtain a lower bound on the entanglement dimension for both two- and multiphoton quantum states. Numerical simulations show that the method is robust against typical experimental noise effects and works well even with limited measurement statistics, thus establishing time-bin encoded photons as a promising platform for high-dimensional quantum-communication protocols.
Quantum states encoded in the time-bin degree of freedom of photons represent a fundamental resource for quantum information protocols. Traditional methods for generating and measuring time-bin-encoded quantum states face severe challenges due to optical instabilities, complex setups, and timing resolution requirements. To circumvent these issues, we leverage an approach based on Hong-Ou-Mandel interference and we propose and demonstrate a robust and scalable protocol to generate and measure arbitrary high-dimensional time-bin quantum states. We experimentally implement the protocol in a photonic setup reaching high-fidelity quantum state tomographies of two- and three-dimensional quantum states encoded in time bins with short temporal separation. We also certify intrasystem polarization-time entanglement of single photons through a nonclassicality test. The demonstrated approach enables access to high-dimensional states and tasks that are practically inaccessible with standard schemes, thereby advancing fundamental quantum information science and opening applications in quantum communication.
Quantum networks enable fundamentally secure communications and entanglement distribution in parallelized quantum computation. Here we describe our high-dimensional quantum network based on frequency-multiplexed time-bin encoding. Our multi-user 21-km experimental testbed is designed for robustness and scalability, with frequency- and temporal-multiplexing for high-rate interconnects while preserving minimal resource usage and multi-party access through simultaneous key or entanglement distribution. Our measurements are in the high-dimensional frequency and temporal conjugate subspaces, via our biphoton frequency comb qudit. Non-local Franson interferometry provide a measured lower-bound of our entanglement-of-formation, and the Schmidt mode decomposition provide an estimate of the accessible quantum information. We highlight adaptive optimization and singly-filtered biphoton combs as a practical architecture in our high-rate quantum network testbed. We describe the photon information efficiency, Shannon capacity, entanglement distribution, raw key rates, security measurements, dispersive bases, code-efficient non-binary error correction, and Holevo bounds embedded in our network.
Photons offer the potential to carry large amounts of information in their spectral, spatial, and polarisation degrees of freedom. While state-of-the-art classical communication systems routinely aim to maximize this information-carrying capacity via wavelength and spatial-mode division multiplexing, quantum systems based on multi-mode entanglement usually suffer from low state quality, long measurement times, and limited encoding capacity. At the same time, entanglement certification methods often rely on assumptions that compromise security. Here we show the certification of photonic high-dimensional entanglement in the transverse position-momentum degree-of-freedom with a record quality, measurement speed, and entanglement dimensionality, without making any assumptions about the state or channels. Using a tailored macro-pixel basis, precise spatial-mode measurements, and a modified entanglement witness, we demonstrate state fidelities of up to 94.4% in a 19-dimensional state-space, entanglement in up to 55 local dimensions, and an entanglement-of-formation of up to 4 ebits. Furthermore, our measurement times show an improvement of more than two orders of magnitude over previous state-of-the-art demonstrations. Our results pave the way for noise-robust quantum networks that saturate the information-carrying capacity of single photons.
High-dimensional entanglement provides unique ways of transcending the limitations of current approaches in quantum information processing, quantum communications based on qubits. The generation of time-frequency qudit states offer significantly increased quantum capacities while keeping the number of photons constant, but pose significant challenges regarding the possible measurements for certification of entanglement. Here, we develop a new scheme and experimentally demonstrate the certification of 24-dimensional entanglement and a 9-dimensional quantum steering. We then subject our photon-pairs to dispersion conditions equivalent to the transmission through 600-km of fiber and still certify 21-dimensional entanglement. Furthermore, we use a steering inequality to prove 7-dimensional entanglement in a semi-device independent manner, proving that large chromatic dispersion is not an obstacle in distributing and certifying high-dimensional entanglement and quantum steering. Our approach, leveraging intrinsic large-alphabet nature of telecom-band photons, enables scalable, commercially viable, and field-deployable entangled and steerable quantum sources, providing a pathway towards fully scalable quantum information processer and high-dimensional quantum communication networks.
High-dimensional entanglement with larger Hilbert spaces enable an encoding of more bits per photon and thus promise increased communication capacities over quantum channels. Quantum frequency combs, which are intrinsically multimode in the temporal and frequency degrees of freedom within a single spatial mode, naturally facilitating the generation and measurement of high-dimensional entanglement. Current challenges include the extension of well-known methods for two qubits to high-dimensional quantum systems and their application in entanglement experiments with photons. More specifically, the major challenge is the certification of high-dimensional entanglement by a number of accessible experimental measurements. In this paper, we increase the Hilbert space dimensionality and provide versatile tools for quantifying and certifying high-dimensional entanglement in a biphoton frequency comb. We quantify the time binned Schmidt number up to 18 and certify entanglement of formation with 1.89 ebits. We have demonstrated a 648- dimensional Hilbert spaces with time-frequency entanglement in a biphoton frequency comb, enabling a computational space up to 13 photonic qubits, and 6.28 bits/photon classical information capacity. This high-dimensional time frequency multimode quantum states of biphoton frequency comb significantly boosting the photon information capacity that is critical for large-scale quantum information processing. Biphoton frequency comb has indeed demonstrated an attractive and powerful approach towards achieving this fundamental goal with applications in high-dimensional quantum information processing, time-frequency cluster-state quantum computation, high-dimensional encoding in quantum networks, and high-dimensional quantum simulations.