A Slow-Time Receiver Interface for Turbulent Free-Space Quantum Polarization Links

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Hauptverfasser: Peng, Heyang, Koudia, Seid, Chatzinotas, Symeon
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Peng, Heyang
Koudia, Seid
Chatzinotas, Symeon
author_facet Peng, Heyang
Koudia, Seid
Chatzinotas, Symeon
contents Atmospheric turbulence makes free-space quantum polarization links intrinsically time varying, whereas receiver-side reduced interfaces are often treated as static. This paper develops a slow-time receiver interface by extending an aperture-conditioned static model to the temporal domain. The receiver-plane phase field, beam-centroid displacement, and scintillation are modeled as hidden slow-time stochastic processes, from which the reduced interface is generated at each instant. A leading-order closure maps coarse-grained phase roughness to an effective polarization-mixing variance while preserving the inherited local polarization-channel family. Aperture conditioning then yields time-dependent effective depolarization, coherence, and detection descriptors. In a representative weak-turbulence case, the polarization branch remains close to the near-ideal regime, with effective depolarization on the order of \(10^{-3}\) and effective coherence close to unity, whereas the detection branch exhibits visibly stronger fluctuations and a longer correlation time. These results show that a single static receiver-side parameterization is insufficient to characterize the temporal behavior of turbulent free-space quantum links. The resulting interface is intended for receiver-side characterization of time-varying quantum links, with MDI-QKD as one representative downstream application.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_18127
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Slow-Time Receiver Interface for Turbulent Free-Space Quantum Polarization Links
Peng, Heyang
Koudia, Seid
Chatzinotas, Symeon
Optics
Quantum Physics
Atmospheric turbulence makes free-space quantum polarization links intrinsically time varying, whereas receiver-side reduced interfaces are often treated as static. This paper develops a slow-time receiver interface by extending an aperture-conditioned static model to the temporal domain. The receiver-plane phase field, beam-centroid displacement, and scintillation are modeled as hidden slow-time stochastic processes, from which the reduced interface is generated at each instant. A leading-order closure maps coarse-grained phase roughness to an effective polarization-mixing variance while preserving the inherited local polarization-channel family. Aperture conditioning then yields time-dependent effective depolarization, coherence, and detection descriptors. In a representative weak-turbulence case, the polarization branch remains close to the near-ideal regime, with effective depolarization on the order of \(10^{-3}\) and effective coherence close to unity, whereas the detection branch exhibits visibly stronger fluctuations and a longer correlation time. These results show that a single static receiver-side parameterization is insufficient to characterize the temporal behavior of turbulent free-space quantum links. The resulting interface is intended for receiver-side characterization of time-varying quantum links, with MDI-QKD as one representative downstream application.
title A Slow-Time Receiver Interface for Turbulent Free-Space Quantum Polarization Links
topic Optics
Quantum Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18127