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Frontiers in Optics

Synchronizing Heralded Single Photon Sources for Efficient Quantum Communication

Fumihiro Kaneda, Alexander D. Hill, Paul G. Kwiat

Published Jan 1, 2016• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We demonstrate synchronized heralded single-photon sources by using a low-loss photon storage technique. Our synchronization scheme can realize efficient two-photon quantum communication protocols, e.g., measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2016.ff2c.7

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Device-independent quantum key distribution protocols allow two honest users to establish a secret key with minimal levels of trust on the provider, as security is proven without any assumption on the inner working of the devices used for the distribution. Unfortunately, the implementation of these protocols is challenging, as it requires the observation of a large Bell-inequality violation between the two distant users. Here, we introduce novel photonic protocols for device-independent quantum key distribution exploiting single-photon sources and heralding-type architectures . The heralding process is designed so that transmission losses become irrelevant for security. We then show how the use of single-photon sources for entanglement distribution in these architectures, instead of standard entangled-pair generation schemes, provides significant improvements on the attainable key rates and distances over previous proposals. Given the current progress in single-photon sources, our work opens up a promising avenue for device-independent quantum key distribution implementations.
In this paper, we mainly introduce the preparation and physical properties of the heralded single-photon source, the development history and its applications in three typical quantum key distribution protocols, including BB84, measurement-device-independent and twin-field quantum key distribution protocols. Moreover, we make comparisons of the above quantum key distribution protocols between using heralded single-photon source and using weak coherent sources, and analyze their advantages and disadvantages. Besides, according to the characteristics of single-photon interference in twin-field quantum key distributions, the limitations of separately applying heralded single-photon sources to twin-field quantum key distributions are revealed, and possible solutions are discussed. Therefore, this work may provide valuable references and help for the practical implementation of quantum secure communication in the near future.
In the last two decades, many quantum optics experiments have demonstrated small-scale quantum information processing applications with several photons. Beyond such proof-of-principle demonstrations, efficient preparation of large, but definite, numbers of photons is of great importance for further scaling up and speeding up photonic quantum information processing. Typical single-photon generation techniques based on nonlinear parametric processes face challenges of probabilistic generation. Here we demonstrate efficient synchronization of photons from multiple nonlinear parametric heralded single-photon sources (HSPSs), using quantum memories (QMs). Our low-loss optical memories greatly enhance (~30x) the generation rate of coincidence photons from two independent HSPSs, while maintaining high indistinguishability (95.7%) of the synchronized photons. As an application, we perform the first demonstration of HSPS-based measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD). The synchronized HSPSs demonstrated here will pave the way toward efficient quantum communication and larger scale optical quantum computing.