Many quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols require random choice of measurement basis for each pulse or each train of pulses. In some QKD protocols, such as the Round-Robin Differential Phase Shift (RRDPS) QKD protocol, this requirement is a bit challenging as randomly choosing hundreds of settings for every, say, 100 pulses may be too fast with current technologies. In this paper, we solve this issue by proving the security of QKD protocols with slow basis choice without compromising the secret key rate. We also show that the random choice of the bases for the state preparation can be made slow if the signals do not leak any information on the basis. Examples of QKD protocols that our technique can apply include the RRDPS protocol and BB84-type protocols, and our technique relaxes demands for the implementation of QKD systems.
We describe a cryptographic protocol in which Wheeler's delayed choice experiment is used to generate the key distribution. The protocol, which uses photons polarized only along one axis, is secure against general attacks.
Atomic Frequency Comb (AFC) protocol has been particularly successful recently to demonstrate the storage of quantum information in a solid medium (rare-earth doped crystals). The AFC is inspired by the photon-echo technique. We show in this paper that the AFC is actually closely related to the slow-light based storage protocols extensively used in atomic vapours. Experimental verifications are performed in thulium doped YAG (Tm3+:YAG). We clarify the interplay between absorption and dispersion and propose a classification of the existing protocols.
We investigate the effect of slow spring-constant drifts of the trap used to shuttle two ions of different mass. We design transport protocols to suppress or mitigate the final excitation energy by applying invariant-based inverse engineering, perturbation theory, and a harmonic dynamical normal-mode approximation. A simple, explicit trigonometric protocol for the trap trajectory is found to be robust with respect to the spring-constant drifts.
It has been found that the signal can be encoded in the choice of the measurement basis of one of the communicating parties, while the outcomes of the measurement are irrelevant for the communication and therefore may be discarded. The proposed protocol was novel and interesting, but it wasn't secure for communication. The eavesdropper can obtain the information without being detected. We utilize the outcomes of the measurement to propose a secure communication protocol. And the error correction code is used to increase the fault tolerance in the noise.
We consider the problem of fault-tolerant quantum computation in the presence of slow error diagnostics, either caused by measurement latencies or slow decoding algorithms. Our scheme offers a few improvements over previously existing solutions, for instance it does not require active error correction and results in a reduced error-correction overhead when error diagnostics is much slower than the gate time. In addition, we adapt our protocol to cases where the underlying error correction strategy chooses the optimal correction amongst all Clifford gates instead of the usual Pauli gates. The r…
A one way partial quantum bit commitment protocol is developed, using states with built-in classical correlation, completely independent of entanglement. It involves concealing information in a set of mutually non-orthogonal states and revealing it through measurements on a set of product states that are mutually orthogonal. Given $2^N$ choices to commit from, the protocol encodes each choice in a $N+1$ qubit state, from $2^N$ non-orthogonal states. A previously agreed upon $N$ qubit state corresponding to each choice, when coupled with the $N+1$ qubit state, yields an element belonging to a s…
This work illustrates a possible application of quantum game theory to the area of quantum information, in particular to quantum cryptography. The study proposed two quantum key-distribution (QKD) protocols based on the quantum version of the Monty Hall game devised by Flitney and Abbott. Unlike most QKD protocols, in which the bits from which the key is going to be extracted are encoded in a basis choice (as in BB84), these are encoded in an operation choice. The first proposed protocol uses qutrits to describe the state of the system and the same game operators proposed by Flitney and Abbott…
We consider two protocols for the measurement of the temporal correlation functions of a dichotomic variable Q appearing in Leggett-Garg type inequalities. The protocols measure solely whether Q has the same or different sign at the ends of a given time interval. They are inspired, in part, by a decoherent histories analysis of the two-time histories of Q although the protocols are ultimately expressed in macrorealistic form independent of quantum theory. The first type involves an ancilla coupled to the system with two sequential CNOT gates, and the two-time histories of the system are determ…
Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) has been demonstrated in both laboratories and field-tests using attenuated lasers combined with the decoy-state technique. Although researchers have studied various decoy-state MDI-QKD protocols with two or three decoy states, a clear comparison between these protocols is still missing. This invokes the question of how many types of decoy states are needed for practical MDI-QKD. Moreover, the system parameters to implement decoy-state MDI-QKD are only partially optimized in all previous works, which casts doubt on the actual pe…
Secure key rate of decoy-state quantum key distribution protocols has been improved with biased basis choice, however, the security standards and parameters of current protocols are different. As a result, we cannot give an accurate key rate comparison between different kinds of protocols. Taking the schemes based on different formula of secure key rate as examples, we give a fair comparison between typical protocols under universal composable security standard. Through analyzing the relationship of security parameters in post-processing stage and final secure key, we achieve the unified quant…
Security of passive entanglement-based key distribution protocols
Network Innovation Laboratories, NTT, Inc.（NTT网络创新实验室）；NTT Research Center for Theoretical Quantum Information, NTT, Inc.（NTT理论量子信息研究中心）；Basic Research Laboratories, NTT, Inc.（NTT基础研究所）
We give a self contained introduction to a few quantum game protocols, starting with the quantum version of the two-player two-choice game of Prisoners dilemma, followed by a n-player generalization trough the quantum minority games, and finishing with a contribution towards a n-player m-choice generalization with a quantum version of a three-player Kolkata restaurant problem. We have omitted some technical details accompanying these protocols, and instead laid the focus on presenting some general aspects of the field as a whole. This review contains an introduction to the formalism of quantum…
Adiabatic approximations break down classically when a constant-energy contour splits into separate contours, forcing the system to choose which daughter contour to follow; the choices often represent qualitatively different behavior, so that slowly changing conditions induce a sudden and drastic change in dynamics. The Kruskal-Henrard-Neishtadt theorem relates the probability of each choice to the rates at which the phase space areas enclosed by the different contours are changing. This represents a connection within closed-system mechanics, and without dynamical chaos, between spontaneous ch…
We present a protocol for quantum key distribution using discrete modulation of coherent states of light. Information is encoded in the variable phase of coherent states which can be chosen from a regular discrete set ranging from binary to continuous modulation, similar to phase-shift-keying in classical communication. Information is decoded by simultaneous homodyne measurement of both quadratures and requires no active choice of basis. The protocol utilizes either direct or reverse reconciliation, both with and without postselection. We analyze the security of the protocol and show how to en…
We develop a practical quantum tomography protocol and implement measurements of pure states of ququarts realized with polarization states of photon pairs (biphotons). The method is based on an optimal choice of the measuring scheme's parameters that provides better quality of reconstruction for the fixed set of statistical data. A high accuracy of the state reconstruction (above 0.99) indicates that developed methodology is adequate.
It is not so well-known that measurement-free quantum error correction protocols can be designed to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing. Despite the potential advantages of using such protocols in terms of the relaxation of accuracy, speed and addressing requirements on the measurement process, they have usually been overlooked because they are expected to yield a very bad threshold as compared to error correction protocols which use measurements. Here we show that this is not the case. We design fault-tolerant circuits for the 9 qubit Bacon-Shor code and find a threshold for gates and pr…
It has been shown that in the asymptotic case of infinite-key length the 2-decoy state QKD protocol outperforms the 1-decoy state protocol. Here, we present a finite-key analysis of the 1-decoy method. Interestingly, we find that for practical block sizes of up to $10^8$ bits, the 1-decoy protocol achieves for almost all experimental settings higher secret key rates than the 2-decoy protocol. Since using only one decoy is also easier to implement, we conclude that it is the best choice for practical QKD.
Reference-Frame-Independent quantum key distribution (RFI-QKD) is known to be robust against slowly varying reference frames. However, other QKD protocols such as BB84 can also provide secrete keys if the speed of the relative motion of the reference frames is slow enough. While there has been a few studies to quantify the speed of the relative motion of the reference frames in RFI- QKD, it is not yet clear if RFI-QKD provides better performance than other QKD protocols under this condition. Here, we analyze and compare the security of RFI-QKD and BB84 protocol in the presence of the relative …
Characterization of equilibrium topological quantum phases by non-equilibrium quench dynamics provides a novel and efficient scheme in detecting topological invariants defined in equilibrium. Nevertheless, most of the previous studies have focused on the ideal sudden quench regime. Here we provide a generic non-adiabatic protocol of slowly quenching the system Hamiltonian, and investigate the non-adiabatic dynamical characterization scheme of topological phase. The {\it slow} quench protocol is realized by introducing a Coulomb-like Landau-Zener problem, and it can describe, in a unified way, …
An important result in classical stochastic thermodynamics is the work fluctuation--dissipation relation (FDR), which states that the dissipated work done along a slow process is proportional to the resulting work fluctuations. Here we show that slowly driven quantum systems violate this FDR whenever quantum coherence is generated along the protocol, and derive a quantum generalisation of the work FDR. The additional quantum terms in the FDR are found to lead to a non-Gaussian work distribution. Fundamentally, our result shows that quantum fluctuations prohibit finding slow protocols that mini…
We review a series of quantum memory protocols designed to store the quantum information carried by light into atomic ensembles. In particular, we show how a simple semiclassical formalism allows to gain insight into various memory protocols and to highlight strong analogies between them. These analogies naturally lead to a classification of light storage protocols into two categories, namely photon echo and slow-light memories. We focus on the storage and retrieval dynamics as a key step to map the optical information into the atomic excitation. We finally review various criteria adapted for …
We address the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of many-body systems subject to slow time-dependent round-trip protocols across quantum and classical (thermal) phase transitions. We consider protocols where one relevant parameter w is slowly changed across its critical point wc = 0, linearly in time with a large time scale ts, from wi < 0 to wf > 0 and then back to wi < 0, thus entailing multiple passages through the critical point. Analogously to the one-way Kibble-Zurek protocols across a critical point, round-trip protocols develop dynamic scaling behaviors at both classical and quantum transiti…
In this work we explore the use of thermodynamic length to improve the performance of experimental protocols. In particular, we implement Landauer erasure on a driven electron level in a semiconductor quantum dot, and compare the standard protocol in which the energy is increased linearly in time with the one coming from geometric optimisation. The latter is obtained by choosing a suitable metric structure, whose geodesics correspond to optimal finite-time thermodynamic protocols in the slow driving regime. We show experimentally that geodesic drivings minimise dissipation for slow protocols, …
Oblivious transfer is a cryptographic primitive where Alice has two bits and Bob wishes to learn some function of them. Ideally, Alice should not learn Bob's desired function choice and Bob should not learn any more than what is logically implied by the function value. While decent quantum protocols for this task are known, many become completely insecure if an adversary were to control the quantum devices used in the implementation of the protocol. In this work we give a fully device-independent quantum protocol for XOR oblivious transfer.
We report a free-space entanglement-based quantum key distribution experiment, implementing the biased basis protocol between two sites which are 15.3 km apart. Photon pairs from a polarization-entangled source are distributed through two 7.8-km free-space optical links. An optimal bias 20:80 between the X and Z basis is used. A post-processing scheme with finite-key analysis is applied to extract the final secure key. After three-hour continuous operation at night, a 4293-bit secure key is obtained, with a final key rate of 0.124 bit per raw key bit which increases the final key rate by 14.8%…
The notion of simulatable security (reactive simulatability, universal composability) is a powerful tool for allowing the modular design of cryptographic protocols (composition of protocols) and showing the security of a given protocol embedded in a larger one. Recently, these methods have received much attention in the quantum cryptographic community. We give a short introduction to simulatable security in general and proceed by sketching the many different definitional choices together with their advantages and disadvantages. Based on the reactive simulatability modelling of Backes, Pfitzman…
We investigate the error tolerance of quantum cryptographic protocols using $d$-level systems. In particular, we focus on prepare-and-measure schemes that use two mutually unbiased bases and a key-distillation procedure with two-way classical communication. For arbitrary quantum channels, we obtain a sufficient condition for secret-key distillation which, in the case of isotropic quantum channels, yields an analytic expression for the maximally tolerable error rate of the cryptographic protocols under consideration. The difference between the tolerable error rate and its theoretical upper boun…
We present a quantum protocol for the task of weak coin flipping. We find that, for one choice of parameters in the protocol, the maximum probability of a dishonest party winning the coin flip if the other party is honest is 1/sqrt(2). We also show that if parties restrict themselves to strategies wherein they cannot be caught cheating, their maximum probability of winning can be even smaller. As such, the protocol offers additional security in the form of cheat sensitivity.
It is shown that maximally efficient protocols for secure direct quantum communications can be constructed using any arbitrary orthogonal basis. This establishes that no set of quantum states (e.g. GHZ states, W states, Brown states or Cluster states) has an advantage over the others, barring the relative difficulty in physical implementation. The work provides a wide choice of states for experimental realization of direct secure quantum communication protocols. We have also shown that this protocol can be generalized to a completely orthogonal state based protocol of Goldenberg-Vaidman (GV) t…
Dynamical characterization of equilibrium topological phases has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we make a thorough exploration of the non-adiabatic characterization of topological phases under slow quench protocol. We first propose an exactly solvable multi-state Landau-Zener model that can be directly applied to the non-adiabatic slow quench dynamics of topological systems. Then we present two different schemes to characterize the bulk topology of the system based on the so called spin inversion surface. The first one needs least number of quenching processes…
Quantum key distribution protocols based on equiangular spherical codes are introduced and their behavior under the intercept/resend attack investigated. Such protocols offer a greater range of secure noise tolerance and speed options than protocols based on their cousins, the mutually-unbiased bases, while also enabling the determination of the channel noise rate without the need to sacrifice key bits. For fixed number of signal states in a given dimension, the spherical code protocols offer Alice and Bob more noise tolerance at the price of slower key generation rates.
Self-testing protocols are methods to determine the presence of shared entangled states in a device independent scenario, where no assumptions on the measurements involved in the protocol are made. A particular type of self-testing protocol, called parallel self-testing, can certify the presence of copies of a state, however such protocols typically suffer from the problem of requiring a number of measurements that increases with respect to the number of copies one aims to certify. Here we propose a procedure to transform single-copy self-testing protocols into a procedure that certifies the t…
We analyze how the performance of a quantum-repeater network depends on the protocol employed to distribute entanglement, and we find that the choice of repeater-to-repeater link protocol has a profound impact on communication rate as a function of hardware parameters. We develop numerical simulations of quantum networks using different protocols, where the repeater hardware is modeled in terms of key performance parameters, such as photon generation rate and collection efficiency. These parameters are motivated by recent experimental demonstrations in quantum dots, trapped ions, and nitrogen-…
We propose a scheme feasible with current technology to implement a quantum delayed-choice experiment in the realm of cavity QED. Our scheme uses two-level atoms interacting on and off resonantly with a single mode of a high Q cavity. At the end of the protocol, the state of the cavity returns to its ground state, allowing new sequential operations. The particle and wave behavior, which are verified in a single experimental setup, are postselected after the atomic states are selectively detected.
A simple protocol which takes advantage of the inherent random times of detections in single photon counting modules is presented for random active basis choices when using entanglement-based protocols for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). It may also be applicable to the BB84 protocol in certain cases. The scheme presented uses the single photon detectors already present on a QKD setup, working on the same rate as the system is capable of detecting, and is, therefore, not limited by the output rates of quantum random number generators. This protocol only requires small hardware modifications ma…
We propose a reference-frame-independent measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution with uncharacterized quantum bits. We show the security of the protocol. The protocol can also be useful for a channel that has a very low bit error rate but suffers a large, uncontrolled (but slow), unitary rotation.
In order to perform Quantum Cryptography procedures it is often essencial to ensure that the parties of the communication are authentic. Such task is accomplished by quantum authentication protocols which are distributed algorithms based on the intrinsic properties of Quantum Mechanics. The choice of an authentication protocol must consider that quantum states are very delicate and that the channel is subject to eavesdropping. However, even in face of the various existing definitions of quantum authentication protocols in the literature, little is known about them in this perspective, and this…
Hybrid quantum memory leveraging slow-light and gradient-echo duality
Centre for Quantum Optical Technologies, Centre of New Technologies, University of Warsaw（华沙大学新技术中心量子光学技术研究中心）；Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw（华沙大学物理学院）
Using an experimental setup that simulates a turbulent atmosphere, we study the secret key rate for quantum key distribution protocols in orbital angular momentum based free space quantum communication. The quantum key distribution protocols under consideration include the Ekert 91 protocol for different choices of mutually unbiased bases and the six-state protocol. We find that the secret key rate of these protocols decay to zero roughly at the same scale where the entanglement of formation decays to zero.
Typically, time-dependent thermodynamic protocols need to run asymptotically slowly in order to avoid dissipative losses. By adapting ideas from counter-diabatic driving and Floquet engineering to open systems, we develop fast-forward protocols for swiftly thermalizing a system oscillator locally coupled to an optical phonon bath. These protocols control the system frequency and the system-bath coupling to induce a resonant state exchange between the system and the bath. We apply the fast-forward protocols to realize a fast approximate Otto engine operating at high power near the Carnot Effici…
Counter-diabatic driving protocols were proposed as a means to do fast changes in the Hamiltonian without exciting transitions. Such driving in principle allows one to realize arbitrarily fast annealing protocols or implement fast dissipationless driving, circumventing standard adiabatic limitations requiring infinitesimally slow rates. These ideas were tested and used both experimentally and theoretically in small systems, but in larger chaotic systems it is known that exact counter-diabatic protocols do not exist. In this work we develop a simple variational approach allowing one to find bes…
