Surpassing the loss-noise robustness trade-off in quantum key distribution

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Seabrook, Hannah, Lavie, Emilien, Strömberg, Teodor, Stafford, Matthew P., Rubino, Giulia
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Seabrook, Hannah
Lavie, Emilien
Strömberg, Teodor
Stafford, Matthew P.
Rubino, Giulia
author_facet Seabrook, Hannah
Lavie, Emilien
Strömberg, Teodor
Stafford, Matthew P.
Rubino, Giulia
contents Quantum key distribution (QKD) offers a theoretically secure method to share secret keys, yet practical implementations face challenges due to noise and loss over long-distance channels. Traditional QKD protocols require extensive noise compensation, hindering their industrial scalability and lowering the achievable key rates. Alternative protocols encode logical qubits in noise-resilient states, but at the cost of using many physical qubits, increasing susceptibility to loss and limiting transmission distance. In this work, we introduce a logical qubit encoding that uses antisymmetric Bell-states in the continuous photonic degrees of freedom, frequency and time. By leveraging the continuous space, we overcome this noise-loss robustness trade-off by minimising the number of photons per logical qubit, whilst optimising the encoding resilience over noise fluctuations. We analyse the security of our encoding and demonstrate its robustness compared to existing state-of-the-art protocols. This approach provides a path towards scalable, efficient QKD implementations under realistic noise conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_08694
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Surpassing the loss-noise robustness trade-off in quantum key distribution
Seabrook, Hannah
Lavie, Emilien
Strömberg, Teodor
Stafford, Matthew P.
Rubino, Giulia
Quantum Physics
Quantum key distribution (QKD) offers a theoretically secure method to share secret keys, yet practical implementations face challenges due to noise and loss over long-distance channels. Traditional QKD protocols require extensive noise compensation, hindering their industrial scalability and lowering the achievable key rates. Alternative protocols encode logical qubits in noise-resilient states, but at the cost of using many physical qubits, increasing susceptibility to loss and limiting transmission distance. In this work, we introduce a logical qubit encoding that uses antisymmetric Bell-states in the continuous photonic degrees of freedom, frequency and time. By leveraging the continuous space, we overcome this noise-loss robustness trade-off by minimising the number of photons per logical qubit, whilst optimising the encoding resilience over noise fluctuations. We analyse the security of our encoding and demonstrate its robustness compared to existing state-of-the-art protocols. This approach provides a path towards scalable, efficient QKD implementations under realistic noise conditions.
title Surpassing the loss-noise robustness trade-off in quantum key distribution
topic Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08694