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arXiv:quant-ph/9611042 · Applied Physics Letters

“Plug and play” systems for quantum cryptography

A. Muller, T. Herzog, B. Huttner, Wolfgang Tittel, H. Zbinden, N. Gisin

Published Feb 17, 1997• 359 citations
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Abstract

We present a time-multiplexed interferometer based on Faraday mirrors, and apply it to quantum key distribution. The interfering pulses follow exactly the same spatial path, ensuring very high stability and self balancing. The use of Faraday mirrors compensates automatically any birefringence effects and polarization dependent losses in the transmitting fiber. First experimental results show a fringe visibility of 0.9984 for a 23-km-long interferometer, based on installed telecom fibers.

DOI
10.1063/1.118224

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We present a time-multiplexed interferometer based on Faraday mirrors, and apply it to quantum key distribution. The interfering pulses follow exactly the same spatial path, ensuring very high stability and self balancing. The use of Faraday mirrors compensates automatically any birefringence effects and polarization dependent losses in the transmitting fiber. First experimental results show a fringe visibility of 0.9984 for a 23-km-long interferometer, based on installed telecom fibers.
We present a time-multiplexed interferometer based on Faraday mirrors, and apply it to quantum key distribution. The interfering pulses follow exactly the same spatial path, ensuring very high stability and self balancing. Use of Faraday mirrors compensates automatically any birefringence effects and polarization dependent losses in the transmitting fiber. First experimental results show a fringe visibility of 0.9984 for a 23km-long interferometer, based on installed telecom fibers. In so-called private-key cryptographic systems, secure transmission through unprotected channels rely on the exchange of secret keys, known only to the sender, Alice, and the receiver, Bob. Quantum cryptography (QC) relies on the properties of quantum mechanics to obtain a provably secure key distribution [1, 2, 3, 4]. Most exisiting implementations rely on either the polarization [2, 5, 6] or the phase [7, 8, 9, 10] of very weak pulses of light as information carrier. To date, the longest transmission spans were obtained in optical fibers, at a wavelength of 1300 nm [6, 9, 10]. The main difficulty with polarization-based systems is the need to keep stable polarizations over distances of tens of kilometers, in standard telecom cables. Indeed, due to the birefringence of the fibers and the effect of the environment, the output polarization fluctuates randomly. Recent experiments [6]
To compensate for all polarization fluctuations in the transmitting fiber by using Faraday mirror is discussed, and and- system based on Faraday mirror for quantum cryptography is introduced, phase-encoding analysis in brief for plug- and- play system is implemented. The interfering pulses follow exactly the same spatial path, ensuring very high stability and self-compensating. The use of Faraday mirrors compensates for automatically any birefringence effects and polarization dependent losses in the transmitting fiber.
This report proposes a “Plug and Play” quantum key distribution system using differential phase shift, in which any birefringence effects and polarization-dependent losses in the telecom fiber are automatically compensated by using a Faraday mirror. In this system, a light pulse is split into three pulses after traveling through four couplers and a light intensity feedback servosystem is plugged into this system in order to adjust the phase shifter to compensate the variation of these three pulses. The efficiency of key creation in this system is 8/3 higher than the conventional cryptosystem based on the BB84 protocol.
We have recently constructed a fiber-optic “plug and play” quantum cryptography system as shown in Fig.1, wherein a Faraday-Mirror was used to compensate the polarization mode dispersion and phase drifts. It worked at 1550 nm and was based on the B92 protocol[1]. We have achieved stable quantum key distribution in a standard telecom fiber with different working-distances of 10, 25 and 50 km, respectively, by using some specifically developed techniques to guarantee long-term stability of our system, such as polarization-independent phase-modulation for stable phase encoding and decoding, hybrid coincidence for efficient detection of single photons with coincidence-gated quenching of the single-photon detectors followed by coincident counting of the avalanche signals, and synchronized detection of single-photon pulses by coincidence counting gated with proper delay and width. These unique techniques greatly enhanced the fringe visibility of single-photon interference. And we have also demonstrated the application of our system in cryptographic communication by sending coded pictures from Alice to Bob using the sifted quantum keys.