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SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS OF SPDC-BASED ENTANGLED PHOTON PAIR SOURCE FOR QUANTUM COMMUNICATIONS WITH SPECTRAL MULTIPLEXING

Breno Perlingeiro

Published Aug 31, 2022• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The quantum internet has dragged the attention of many researchers and companies.The essential element to accomplish it is entanglement.Distributing entanglement allows the transmission of qubits without really sending them through the quantum channel.Therefore, the source that produces these entangled states shall do it reliably and with a competitive rate to classical communication.This work presents a simulation tool for the most common entangled photon pair source, the SPDC-based EPPS.Furthermore, using filters, we can emulate the effect of cavity-enhanced SPDC.Optimizing the parameters of the source, we achieved a 6dB gain on the Secret Key Rate compared to a simple SPDC process.

DOI
10.17771/pucrio.acad.61143

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The quantum internet has dragged the attention of many researchers and companies.The essential element to accomplish it is entanglement.Distributing entanglement allows the transmission of qubits without really sending them through the quantum channel.Therefore, the source that produces these entangled states shall do it reliably and with a competitive rate to classical communication.This work presents a simulation tool for the most common entangled photon pair source, the SPDC-based EPPS.Furthermore, using filters, we can emulate the effect of cavity-enhanced SPDC.Optimizing the parameters of the source, we achieved a 6dB gain on the Secret Key Rate compared to a simple SPDC process.
Entangled photon sources with high spectral brightness are important resources for photonic quantum information processing, particularly in quantum communication and quantum networking where usable photon flux of entangled photons is often constrained by channel loss and source inefficiency. Here, we demonstrate a spectrally engineered type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution. By pumping a 30-mm ppKTP crystal with an ultra-narrowband laser slightly detuned from degeneracy, photon-pair generation is concentrated into a narrow spectral bandwidth while retaining the strong nonlinear interaction of type-0 phase matching. The source produces a coincidence rate of 44.6 kHz corresponding to a detected spectral brightness of 0.507 MHz/mW/nm. We further integrate the source into a Sagnac interferometer to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs and demonstrate entanglement distribution through a 2.56 km free-space round-trip channel. Our results show that spectral engineering provides a practical route to compact, spectrally bright entangled-photon sources for quantum communication applications.
Single-photon sources are crucial components for the implementation of quantum communication protocols. However, photons emitted by some of the most popular types of realistic sources are spectrally broadband. Due to this drawback, the signal emitted from such sources is typically affected by the effect of temporal broadening during its propagation through telecommunication fibers which exhibit chromatic dispersion. Such problem can be observed e.g. when using sources based on the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). In the case of long-distance quantum communication temporal broadening can significantly limit the efficiency of temporal filtering. It is a popular method, which relies on the reduction of the duration time of the detection window, used for decreasing the number of registered errors. In this work we analyzed the impact of the type of spectral correlation within a pair of photons produced by the SPDC source on the temporal width of those photons during their propagation in dispersive media. We found out that in some situations this width can be decreased by changing the typical negative spectral correlation into positive one or by reducing its strength. This idea can be used to increase the efficiency of the temporal filtering method. Therefore, it can be applied in various implementations of quantum communication protocols. As an example of the application we subsequently analyzed the security of a quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme based on single photons. The investigation was performed for the configuration with the source of photons located in the middle between the legitimate participants of a QKD protocol (called typically Alice and Bob). We demonstrated that when the information about the emission time of the photons produced by the SPDC source is not distributed to Alice and Bob, the maximal security distance can be considerably extended by using positively correlated photons, while in the opposite case strongly (no matter positively or negatively) correlated photons are optimal. We also found out that the results of our calculation may be very sensitive to the spectral widths of the photons produced by the SPDC source. In addition, we concluded that in realistic situation Alice and Bob would have to optimize their source over both the spectral widths of the generated photons and the type of spectral correlation in order to maximally extend the security distance. The results of our work are, in particular, important for the QKD systems utilizing commercial telecom fibers populated by strong classical signals. In those systems temporal filtering method can be used to reduce not only the dark counts registered by the detection system, but also the channel noise originating from the process of Raman scattering, which is the main factor limiting their performance.
Quantum network implementations using single spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC)-based broadband entangled photon pair source (EPPS) have been reported recently. Here, leveraging the wavelength-correlation between entangled photon pairs, the traditional wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) method is utilized to route photons based on their wavelengths. From single EPPS, entangled photon pairs are distributed in a centralized way to different node pairs in the network. However, the number of nodes pairs that can be entangled in a network is limited by the number of entangled wavelength pairs that an EPPS can generate. To entangle a higher number of node pairs in a network, multiple EPPSs can be employed. In this work, we present a WDM-based entanglement distribution approach using multiple EPPSs in multi-hop repeaterless mesh optical networks. We experimentally characterize two EPPSs developed in-house and consider multiple such EPPSs in the network to perform network-level simulations. We consider heterogeneous entanglement demands requiring different entanglement bit (ebit) rates and entanglement visibility. For each entanglement demand, EPPS placement/selection, wavelength-pair assignment, and photon pair routing are performed considering the degradation in both ebit rate and visibility with fiber length and hops in the network. Two main findings of this study include: (i) a hybrid approach of one-photon (OP) and both-photon (BP) entanglement distribution provides higher flexibility in multi-EPPS placement and (ii) distributed entanglement distribution using multiple EPPSs enables better entanglement resource utilization and higher entanglement demand acceptance as compared to centralized entanglement distribution.
Single-photon sources are crucial components for the implementation of quantum communication protocols. However, photons emitted by some of the most popular types of realistic sources are spectrally broadband. Due to this drawback, the signal emitted from such sources is typically affected by the effect of temporal broadening during its propagation through telecommunication fibers which exhibit chromatic dispersion. Such problem can be observed e.g. when using sources based on the process of spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). In the case of long-distance quantum communication temporal broadening can significantly limit the efficiency of temporal filtering. It is a popular method, which is based on the reduction of the duration time of the detection window, used for decreasing the number of registered errors. In this work we analyzed the impact of the type of spectral correlation within a pair of photons produced by the SPDC source on the temporal width of those photons during their propagation in dispersive media. We found out that in some situations the width can be decreased by changing the typical negative spectral correlation into positive one or by reducing its strength. This idea can be used to increase the efficiency of the temporal filtering method. Therefore it can be applied in various implementations of quantum communication protocols. As an example of the application we subsequently analyzed the security of a quantum key distribution (QKD) scheme based on single photons. It was realized in the configuration with the source of photons located in the middle between the legitimate participants of a QKD protocol (called typically Alice and Bob). We demonstrated that when the information about the emission time of the photons produced by the SPDC source is not distributed to Alice and Bob, the maximal security distance can be considerably extended by using positively correlated photons, while in the opposite case strongly (no matter positively or negatively) correlated photons are optimal. We also found out that the results of our calculation may be very sensitive to the spectral widths of the photons produced by the SPDC source. In addition, we concluded that in realistic situation Alice and Bob would have to optimize their source over both the spectral widths of the generated photons and the type of spectral correlation in order to maximally extend the security distance. The results of our work are, in particular, important for the QKD systems utilizing commercial telecom fibers populated by strong classical signals. In those systems temporal filtering method can be used to reduce not only the dark counts registered by the detection system, but also the channel noise originating from the process of Raman scattering, which is the main factor limiting their performance.
A workflow for evaluation of entanglement source quality is proposed. Based on quantum state density matrices obtained from theoretical models and experimental data, we make an estimate of a potential performance of a quantum entanglement source in quantum key distribution protocols. This workflow is showcased for continuously pumped spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) source, where it highlights the trade-off between entangled pair generation rate and entanglement quality caused by multiphoton nature of the generated quantum states. We employ this characterization technique to show that secure key rate of down-converted photon pairs is limited to 0.029 bits per detection window due to intrinsic multiphoton contributions. We also report that there exists one optimum gain for continuous-wave down-conversion sources. We find a bound for secure key rate extracted from SPDC sources and make a comparison with perfectly single-pair quantum states, such as those produced by quantum dots.
We theoretically investigate the problem of finding optimal characteristics of photon pairs, produced in the spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) process, for fiber-based quantum communication protocols. By using the accessible setup parameters, the pump pulse duration and the extended phase-matching function width, we minimize the temporal width of SPDC photons within the general scenario. This allows one to perform more effectively the temporal filtering procedure, which aims at reducing the noise acquired by the measurement devices. Moreover, we compare the obtained results with the achievable parameter values for SPDC sources based on [Formula: see text]-Barium Borate crystal. We also investigate the influence of non-zero detection timing jitter. Finally, we apply our optimization strategy to a simple quantum key distribution scheme to show that the full optimization of an SPDC source can potentially extend the maximal security distance by several tens of kilometres, which is around 30% more as compared to previous approaches.