Quantum communication has been rapidly developed due to its unconditional security and successfully implemented through optical fibers and free-space air in experiments. To build a complete quantum communication network involving satellites in space and submersibles in ocean, the underwater quantum channel has been investigated in both theory and experiment. However, the question of whether the polarization encoded qubit can survive through a long-distance and high-loss underwater channel, which is considered as the restricted area for satellite-borne radio waves, still remains. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the transmission of blue-green photonic polarization states through 55-m-long water. We prepare six universal quantum states at the single photon level and observe their faithful transmission in a large marine test platform. We obtain complete information of the channel by quantum process tomography. The distance demonstrated in this work reaches a region allowing potential real applications, representing a step further towards air-to-sea quantum communication.
Quantum communication has been rapidly developed due to its unconditional security and successfully implemented through optical fibers and free-space air in experiments. To build a complete quantum communication network involving satellites in space and submersibles in ocean, the underwater quantum channel has been investigated in both theory and experiment. However, the question of whether the polarization encoded qubit can survive through a long-distance and high-loss underwater channel, which is considered as the restricted area for satellite-borne radio waves, still remains. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the transmission of blue-green photonic polarization states through 55-m-long water. We prepare six universal quantum states at the single photon level and observe their faithful transmission in a large marine test platform. We obtain complete information of the channel by quantum process tomography. The distance demonstrated in this work reaches a region allowing potential real applications, representing a step further towards air-to-sea quantum communication.
Quantum communication has been rapidly developed due to its unconditional security and successfully implemented through optical fibers and free-space air in experiment. To build a complete quantum communication network involving satellites in space and submersibles in ocean, underwater quantum channel has been investigated in both theory and experiment. However, the question of whether the polarization encoded qubit can survive through a long-distance and high-loss underwater channel, which is considered as the restricted area for satellite-borne radio waves, still remains. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the transmission of blue-green photonic polarization states through 55-meter-long water. We prepare six universal quantum states at single photon level and observe their faithful transmission in a large marine test platform. We obtain the complete information of the channel by quantum process tomography. The distance demonstrated in this work reaches a region allowing potential real applications, representing a step further towards air-to-sea quantum communication.
Long-distance quantum channels capable of transferring quantum states faithfully for unconditionally secure quantum communication have been so far confirmed to be feasible in both fiber and free-space air. However, it remains unclear whether seawater, which covers more than 70% of the earth, can also be utilized, leaving global quantum communication incomplete. Here we experimentally demonstrate that polarization quantum states including general qubits of single photon and entangled states can survive well after travelling through seawater. We perform experiments with seawater collected over a range of 36 kilometers in the Yellow Sea. For single photons at 405 nm in a blue-green window, we obtain an average process fidelity above 98%. For entangled photons at 810nm, albeit very high loss, we observe the violation of Bell inequality with 33 standard deviations. Our results confirm the feasibility of a seawater quantum channel, representing the first step towards underwater quantum communication.
Abstract As an emerging channel resource for modern optics, big data, internet traffic and quantum technologies, twisted photons carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have been extended their applicable boundary in different media, such as optical fiber and atmosphere. Due to the extreme condition of loss and pressure, underwater transmission of twisted photons has not been well investigated yet. Especially, single-photon tests were all limited at a level of a few meters, and it is in practice unclear what will happen for longer transmission distances. Here we experimentally demonstrate the transmission of single-photon twisted light over an underwater channel up to 55 m, which reach a distance allowing potential real applications. For different order OAM states and their superposition, a good preservation of modal structure and topological charge are observed. Our results for the first time reveal the real transmission performance of twisted photons in a long-distance regime, representing a step further towards OAM-based underwater quantum communication.
Atmospheric free space and fiber have been widely exploited as the channels for quantum communication, and have enabled intercontinent and intercity applications. An air-sea free-space channel, being capable of linking the satellite-based quantum resource and underwater vehicle, has now become the last piece of the puzzle in building a global quantum communication network. Here, we present an experimental demonstration of air-water decoy-state quantum key distribution against high loss, meanwhile keeping a low quantum bit error rate less than 2.5% for different distances. We are able to reach a long-distance quantum key distribution in water channel that can enable real-life air-sea quantum-communication tasks. The demonstrated distance, even in coastal water of Jerlov type III, is up to 30 m, about one-order improvement over the proof-in-principle demonstrations in the previous experiments, and the channel loss is equivalent to 345-m-long clean seawater of Jerlov type I, representing a key step forward to practical air-sea secure communication.
High-capacity, long-distance underwater optical communication enables a global scale optical network covering orbit, land, and water. Underwater communication using photons as carriers has a high channel capacity; however, the light scattering and absorption of water lead to an inevitable huge channel loss, setting an insurmountable transmission distance for existing underwater optical communication technologies. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the photon-inter-correlation optical communication (PICOC) in air–water scenarios. We retrieve additional internal correlation resources from the sparse single-photon stream with high fidelity. We successfully realize the 105-m-long underwater optical communication against a total loss up to 120.1 dB using only a microwatt laser. The demonstrated underwater light attenuation is equivalent to the loss of 883-m-long Jerlov type I water, encouraging the practical air–water optical communication to connect deeper underwater worlds.
Photonic entanglement is a fundamental resource in quantum information processing and its distribution between distant parties is a key challenge in quantum communications. Optical satellite links allow transmitting entangled photons over longer distances than currently possible on ground and could provide a path towards global quantum communication networks. The majority of current photonic free-space quantum communication systems, including two recent quantum satellite experiments, use two-dimensional polarization encoding, where each photon can carry at most a single bit of quantum information. Encoding additional qubits in the high-dimensional spatio-temporal degrees of freedom could not only increase channel capacities but also improve robustness with respect to noise and eavesdropping in quantum cryptography. Here, we give an overview of our efforts towards exploiting high-dimensional entanglement in long-distance free-space quantum communications. We report on the results of a first feasibility study, in which we used polarization / energy-time hyperentanglement to increase the dimensionality of the state space and transmit genuine 4-dimensional entanglement via an intra-city free-space link. We discuss how we intend to extend this approach to applications in noise-tolerant large-alphabet quantum key distribution via free-space links, and, ultimately, experiments with satellites.