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arXiv:quant-ph/0306108 · Physical Review Letters

Optical Telecom Networks as Weak Quantum Measurements with Postselection

Nicolas Brunner, Antonio Acín, Daniel Collins, Nicolas Gisin, Valerio Scarani

Published Oct 28, 2003• 86 citations
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Abstract

We show that weak measurements with postselection, proposed in the context of the quantum theory of measurement, naturally appear in the everyday physics of fiber optics telecom networks through polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) and polarization-dependent losses (PDL). Specifically, the PMD leads to a time-resolved discrimination of polarization; the postselection is done in the most natural way: one postselects those photons that have not been lost because of the PDL. The quantum formalism is shown to simplify the calculation of optical networks in the telecom limit of weak PMD.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.91.180402

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We show that weak measurements with postselection, proposed in the context of the quantum theory of measurement, naturally appear in the everyday physics of fiber optics telecom networks through polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) and polarization-dependent losses (PDL). Specifically, the PMD leads to a time-resolved discrimination of polarization; the postselection is done in the most natural way: one postselects those photons that have not been lost because of the PDL. The quantum formalism is shown to simplify the calculation of optical networks in the telecom limit of weak PMD.
The implementation of quantum communication protocols in long optical fibers is limited by several decoherence mechanisms. In this contribution we review this mechanisms and analysis their effect on the quantum states. Because of asymmetry in the real fibers, the two orthogonal polarization modes are propagated at different phase and group velocities. The difference in group velocities results in Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD). It is created by random fluctuations of the residual birefringence in optical fibers, such that the State of Polarization (SOP) of an optical signal will turn randomly over time, in an unpredictable way. In optical quantum communication, quantum state measurement is necessary. The bottleneck for communication between far apart nodes is the increasing of the error probability with the length of the channel connecting the nodes. For an optical fiber, the value of absorption and depolarization of a photon (i.e., the qubit) increases exponentially with the length of the fiber.
Quantum networking brings together several diverse research areas, such as fiber-optic communication, quantum optics, and quantum information, to achieve capabilities in security, secret sharing, and authentication which are unavailable classically. The development of practical fiber-based quantum networks requires an understanding of the reach, rates, and quality of the entanglement of distributed quantum states. Here, we present a theoretical model describing how the magnitude and orientation of polarization dependent loss (PDL), a common impairment in fiber-optic networks, affects the entanglement quality of distributed quantum states. Furthermore, we theoretically characterize how PDL in one fiber channel can be optimally applied in order to nonlocally compensate for the PDL present in another channel. We present experimental results that verify our theoretical model.