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Photonics North (PN)

Phase Control in Polarization Maintaining Fiber for Quantum Key Distribution

Wilson Wu, Ramy Tannous, Kimia Mohammadi, Paul J. Godin, Brendon L. Higgins, Thomas D. Jennewein

Published Jun 12, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Polarization encodings for quantum key distribution (QKD) in fiber suffer from strain- and temperature-induced polarization instabilities, which can be addressed using a polarization control system. The polarization instability can be reduced to a single phase parameter by using polarization maintaining (PM) fiber. However, phase control in PM fiber is typically applied to phase stabilization on signals coupled into only one bases of the PM fiber, making such methods insufficient for QKD which encodes signals in orthogonal bases. We describe an active system to monitor and control the phase in PM fiber to enable PM fiber based QKD systems.

DOI
10.1109/pn58661.2023.10223003

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Polarization-encoding provides a promising approach for the practical quantum key distribution (QKD) system due to the simple encoding and decoding method. Here we present a long-term stable polarization-encoding QKD with a real-time polarization control. The polarization of the signal photons in the optical fiber was maintained stable by using time-division-multiplexed reference pulses for feedback control. We implemented this technique in the QKD experiment in 50 km fiber to show that it could facilitate polarization-encoded quantum communication. The system operated stably for ∼460 min, and the quantum bit error rate was ∼5.27%. The raw key generating rate in this system was kept stable at ∼500 bits s -1 . The advantages and disadvantages of the previous polarization-control schemes were also rigorously analyzed.
Polarizations of single-photon pulses have been controlled with long-term stability of more than 10 hours by using an active feedback technique for auto-compensation of unpredictable polarization scrambling in long-distance fiber. Experimental tests of long-term operations in 50, 75 and 100 km fibers demonstrated that such a single-photon polarization control supported stable polarization encoding in long-distance fibers to facilitate stable one-way fiber system for polarization-encoded quantum key distribution, providing quantum bit error rates below the absolute security threshold.
Abstract The Quantum Key Distribution protocol can encode a single quantum state and implements an information-theoretically secure key distribution protocol in communication. In the actual QKD experimental system, there are usually two encoding methods which are phase encoding and polarization encoding. Ma et al (Phase-Matching Quantum Key Distribution, Phys. Rev. X., 2018, 83) proposed the phase-matching QKD protocol, which has high transmission and it is an extension of the measurement device independent QKD. This paper successfully gives the polarization scheme of this PM-QKD protocol, the bases in the polarization scheme are arbitrary, and eliminates detector side channel attacks. Furthermore, we give the security analysis and simulation results of the polarization scheme, and compare it with the BB84 protocol. The simulation results show that our protocol is superior to the BB84 protocol in terms of transmission distance under the fixed key rate.