We demonstrate a novel technique to measure the nonlinear phase shifts of multi-span fiber optic links with a polarization-multiplexed coherent transceiver based on cross-phase modulation between two orthogonally polarized subcarrier tones.
We observed conditional cross-phase modulation (C-XPM) applicable to quantum phase gate. Combinations of two probe field’s polarizations conditioned XPM of two probe fields in the corresponding nonlinear optical system. With optimized parameters of multi-photon transition, we could increase C-XPM more than 1 rad. with small probe absorption. Group velocity matching ratio between probe pulses was estimated to 1.2 in the optical loop system. Because multi-photon interference depends on the ratio between the Rabi frequencies of the probe fields, not the individual intensity, we expect the same phase shift between few photons level’s probe pulses in our scheme.
We experimentally demonstrated a high-performance multi-protocol continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) using one transceiver. The demonstrated multi-protocol CV-QKD system can simultaneously distribute 5 subcarriers with Gaussian, 4QAM, 16QAM, 64QAM, and 1024QAM modulation protocols based on orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) technology. Moreover, the modulation variance and probability distribution factor of 5 subcarriers are carefully optimized to maximize their respective SKRs. Besides, we innovatively design an effective OFDM-based DSP scheme and a precise dual-stage phase noise compensation scheme to realize a low excess noise for each subcarrier operating at a 2 GHz symbol rate. Thus, the multi-protocol CV-QKD achieves multiple SKRs of 48.79, 7.58, 23.67, 32.93, and 36.78 Mbps over a typical transmission distance of 50 km within a single transmission. Therefore, our work provides a practical solution to achieve highly efficient, interoperable, flexible, and secure QKDs for high-speed quantum secure communication.