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arXiv:quant-ph/0605206 · Physical Review Letters

Experimental Quantum Communication without a Shared Reference Frame

Teng‐Yun Chen, Jun Zhang, Jean-Christian Boileau, Xian‐Min Jin, Bin Yang, Qiang Zhang, Tao Yang, Raymond Laflamme, Jian-Wei Pan

Published Apr 21, 2006• 66 citations
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Abstract

We present an experimental realization of a robust quantum communication scheme [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 220501 (2004)] using pairs of photons entangled in polarization and time. Our method overcomes errors due to collective rotation of the polarization modes (e.g., birefringence in optical fiber or misalignment), is insensitive to the phase's fluctuation of the interferometer, and does not require any shared reference frame including time reference, except the need to label different photons. The practical robustness of the scheme is further shown by implementing a variation of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 quantum key distribution protocol over 1 km optical fiber.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.96.150504

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We present an experimental realization of a robust quantum communication scheme [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 220501 (2004)] using pairs of photons entangled in polarization and time. Our method overcomes errors due to collective rotation of the polarization modes (e.g., birefringence in optical fiber or misalignment), is insensitive to the phase's fluctuation of the interferometer, and does not require any shared reference frame including time reference, except the need to label different photons. The practical robustness of the scheme is further shown by implementing a variation of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 quantum key distribution protocol over 1 km optical fiber.
Noise and imperfection of realistic devices are major obstacles for implementing quantum cryptography. In particular, birefringence in optical fibers leads to decoherence of qubits encoded in photon polarization. We show how to overcome this problem by doing single qubit quantum communication without a shared spatial reference frame and precise timing. Quantum information will be encoded in pairs of photons using tag operations, which corresponds to the time delay of one of the polarization modes. This method is robust against the phase instability of the interferometers despite the use of time bins. Moreover synchronized clocks are not required in the ideal no photon loss case as they are necessary only to label the different encoded qubits.
We experimentally implement a fault-tolerant quantum key distribution protocol with two photons in a decoherence-free subspace [Phys. Rev. A 72, 050304(R) (2005)]. It is demonstrated that our protocol can yield a good key rate even with a large bit-flip error rate caused by collective rotation, while the usual realization of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 protocol cannot produce any secure final key given the same channel. Since the experiment is performed in polarization space and does not need the calibration of a reference frame, important applications in free-space quantum communication are expected. Moreover, our method can also be used to robustly transmit an arbitrary two-level quantum state in a type of decoherence-free subspace.
To deal with the effect of polarization mode dispersion in single mode fiber,which makes the polarization encoding unsuitable for the fiber-based quantum cryptography,we implemented the experimental demonstration of a quantum cryptography scheme with timing tags using polarization-entangled photon pairs.This scheme can overcome the influence of collective rotation noise of polarization mode in single mode fiber and can work without shared reference frames.A brief introduction is given to the principles and experimental course of this proposal,followed by a discussion on the electronics design for the whole quantum cryptography system.Finally,some results are given and compared them to the theoretical predicts.
We present two polarization-based protocols for quantum key distribution. The protocols encode key bits in noiseless subspaces or subsystems and so can function over a quantum channel subjected to an arbitrary degree of collective noise, as occurs, for instance, due to rotation of polarizations in an optical fiber. These protocols can be implemented using only entangled photon-pair sources, single-photon rotations, and single-photon detectors. Thus, our proposals offer practical and realistic alternatives to existing schemes for quantum key distribution over optical fibers without resorting to interferometry or two-way quantum communication, thereby circumventing, respectively, the need for high precision timing and the threat of Trojan horse attacks.
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We present a three-party reference frame independent quantum key distribution protocol which can be implemented without any alignment of reference frames between the sender and the receiver. The protocol exploits entangled states to establish a secret key among three communicating parties. We derive the asymptotic key rate for the proposed protocol against collective attacks and perform a finite-size key security analysis against general attacks in the presence of statistical fluctuations. We investigate the impact of reference frame misalignment on the stability of our protocol, and we obtain a transmission distance of 180 km, 200 km, and 230 km for rotation of reference frames β = π/6, β = π/8 and β = 0, respectively. Remarkably, our results demonstrate that our proposed protocol is not heavily affected by an increase in misalignment of reference frames as the achievable transmission distances are still comparable to the case where there is no misalignment in reference frames (when β = 0). We also simulate the performance of our protocol for a fixed number of signals. Our results demonstrate that the protocol can achieve an effective key generation rate over a transmission distance of about 120 km with realistic 107 finite data signals and approximately achieve 195 km with 109 signals. Moreover, our proposed protocol is robust against noise in the quantum channel and achieves a threshold error rate of 22.7%.