Practical Long-Distance Side-Channel-Free Quantum Key Distribution

Xiang-Bin Wang, Xiao-Long Hu, and Zong-Wen Yu

Phys. Rev. Applied 12, 054034 – Published 14 November 2019

Abstract

We present a simple protocol for which Alice and Bob must only decide to either send out a coherent state or not send out a coherent state to Charlie. No switching of bases occurs. We demonstrate that this protocol is both source-state side-channel free and measurement-device independent. We do not have to exactly control the whole space of the state of the light pulse, which is an impossible task in practice. The protocol is immune to all adverse effects caused by quantum-state imperfections in the side-channel space, such as the photon frequency spectrum, emission time, propagation direction, spatial angular momentum, and so on. Numerical simulation shows that our scheme can reach a side-channel-free result for quantum key distribution over distances exceeding 200 km, given the single-photon interference-misalignment error rate of 20%.

Received 5 June 2018
Revised 16 August 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.12.054034

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Optical quantum information processing Quantum communication Quantum cryptography Quantum optics

Communication networks

Quantum Information, Science & Technology

Authors & Affiliations

Xiang-Bin Wang ^1,2,4,5,*, Xiao-Long Hu¹, and Zong-Wen Yu³

¹State Key Laboratory of Low-Dimensional Quantum Physics, Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
²Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
³Data Communication Science and Technology Research Institute, Beijing 100191, China
⁴Jinan Institute of Quantum technology, SAICT, Jinan 250101, People’s Republic of China
⁵Shenzhen Institute for Quantum Science and Engineering, and Physics Department, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China

^*xbwang@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn

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Vol. 12, Iss. 5 — November 2019

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Physical Review Applied