基于光量子态避错及容错传输的量子通信

量子通信以量子态为信息载体在远距离的通信各方之间传递信息,因此量子态的传输和远距离共享是量子通信的首要步骤.信道噪声不仅会影响通信效率还可能被窃听者利用从而威胁通信安全,对抗信道噪声是实现安全高效量子通信亟需解决的问题.本文介绍基于光量子态的两类对抗信道噪声的实用方法——量子态的避错传输和容错的量子通信,包括对抗噪声的基本原理和两种方法的代表性方案,并从资源消耗和可操作性的角度分析了方案的实用价值.     

Quantum error rejection for faithful quantum communication over noise channels

Quantum state transmission is a prerequisite for various quantum communication networks. The channel noise inevitably introduces distortion of quantum states passing through either a free-space channel or a fibre channel, which leads to errors or decreases the security of a practical quantum communication network. Quantum error rejection is a useful technology to faithfully transmit quantum states over large-scale quantum channels. It provides the communication parties with an uncorrupted quantum state by rejecting error states. Usually, additional photons or degrees of freedom are required to overcome the adverse effects of channel noise. As quantum error rejection method consumes less quantum resource than other anti-noise methods, it is more convenient to perform error-rejection quantum state transmission with current technology. In this review, several typical quantum errorrejection schemes for single-photon state transmission are introduced in brief and some error-rejection schemes for entanglement distribution are also briefly presented.     

Experimental error filtration for quantum communication over highly noisy channels

Error filtration is a method for encoding the quantum state of a single particle into a higher dimensional Hilbert space in such a way that it becomes less sensitive to noise. We have realized a fiber optics demonstration of this method and illustrated its potentialities by carrying out the optical part of a quantum key distribution scheme over a line whose phase noise is too high for a standard implementation of BB84 to be secure. By filtering out the noise, a bit error rate of 15.3% +/- 0.1%, which is beyond the security limit, can be reduced to 10.6% +/- 0.1%, thereby guaranteeing the cryptographic security.     

Single-photon quantum error rejection and correction with linear optics

We present single-photon schemes for quantum error rejection and correction with linear optics. In stark contrast with other known proposals, our schemes do not require multi-photon entangled states, are not probabilistic, and their application is not restricted to single bit-flip errors.     

Experimental two-photon,three-dimensional entanglement for quantum communication

Orbital angular momentum entangled photons emitted by a down-conversion source are in higher dimensional entangled states. Here we report the experimental confirmation by demonstrating a violation of a generalized Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt-type Bell inequality in three dimensions by more than 18 standard deviations. Higher dimensional entangled states allow the realization of new types of quantum communication protocols. They also provide a more secure quantum cryptography scheme. Therefore our experimental results are likely to have applications in future quantum communication technology.     

Experimental demonstration of counterfactual quantum communication

Quantum effects, besides offering substantial superiority in many tasks over classical methods, are also expected to provide interesting ways to establish secret keys between remote parties. A striking scheme called "counterfactual quantum cryptography" proposed by Noh [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 230501 (2009).] allows one to maintain secure key distributions, in which particles carrying secret information are seemingly not being transmitted through quantum channels. We have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, a faithful implementation for such a scheme with an on-table realization operating at telecom wavelengths. To verify its feasibility for extension over a long distance, we have furthermore reported an illustration on a 1?km fiber. In both cases, high visibilities of more than 98% are achieved through active stabilization of interferometers. Our demonstration is crucial as a direct verification of such a remarkable application, and this procedure can become a key communication module for revealing fundamental physics through counterfactuals.     

Secure deterministic communication in a quantum loss channel using quantum error correction code

The loss of a quantum channel leads to an irretrievable particle loss as well as information. In this paper, the loss of quantum channel is analysed and a method is put forward to recover the particle and information loss effectively using universal quantum error correction. Then a secure direct communication scheme is proposed, such that in a loss channel the information that an eavesdropper can obtain would be limited to arbitrarily small when the code is properly chosen and the correction operation is properly arranged.     

Experimental quantum communication without a shared reference frame

We present an experimental realization of a robust quantum communication scheme [Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 220501 (2004)] using pairs of photons entangled in polarization and time. Our method overcomes errors due to collective rotation of the polarization modes (e.g., birefringence in optical fiber or misalignment), is insensitive to the phase's fluctuation of the interferometer, and does not require any shared reference frame including time reference, except the need to label different photons. The practical robustness of the scheme is further shown by implementing a variation of the Bennett-Brassard 1984 quantum key distribution protocol over 1 km optical fiber.     

Experimental realization of quantum cryptography communication in free space

Quantum cryptography is a new secure communication protocol with the combina- tion of quantum mechanics and information theory[1]. Its security depends on the laws of physics and has been proved strictly[2,3]. Quantum communication is the art of generat- ing and transmitting the keys through a quantum channel between two parties, usually called Alice and Bob. Unlike the classical key distribution, the quantum keys are gener- ated in the process of transmission instantaneously. The keys can be…     

PPLN waveguide for quantum communication

We report on energy-time and time-bin entangled photon-pair sources based on a periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide. Degenerate twin photons at 1 314 nm wavelength are created by spontaneous parametric down-conversion and coupled into standard telecom fibers. Our PPLN waveguide features a very high conversion efficiency of about 10^-6, roughly 4 orders of magnitude more than that obtained employing bulk crystals [#!Tanzilli01a!#]. Even if using low power laser diodes, this engenders a significant probability for creating two pairs at a time - an important advantage for some quantum communication protocols. We point out a simple means to characterize the pair creation probability in case of a pulsed pump. To investigate the quality of the entangled states, we perform photon-pair interference experiments, leading to visibilities of 97% for the case of energy-time entanglement and of 84% for the case of time-bin entanglement. Although the last figure must still be improved, these tests demonstrate the high potential of PPLN waveguide based sources to become a key element for future quantum communication schemes. Received 13 July 2001     

Stabilizer formalism for operator quantum error correction

Operator quantum error correction is a recently developed theory that provides a generalized and unified framework for active error correction and passive error avoiding schemes. In this Letter, we describe these codes using the stabilizer formalism. This is achieved by adding a gauge group to stabilizer codes that defines an equivalence class between encoded states. Gauge transformations leave the encoded information unchanged; their effect is absorbed by virtual gauge qubits that do not carry useful information. We illustrate the construction by identifying a gauge symmetry in Shor's 9-qubit code that allows us to remove 3 of its 8 stabilizer generators, leading to a simpler decoding procedure and a wider class of logical operations without affecting its essential properties. This opens the path to possible improvements of the error threshold of fault-tolerant quantum computing.     

Triggered qutrits for quantum communication protocols

A general protocol in quantum information and communication relies in the ability of producing, transmitting, and reconstructing, in general, qunits. In this Letter we show for the first time the experimental implementation of these three basic steps on a pure state in a three-dimensional space, by means of the orbital angular momentum of the photons. The reconstruction of the qutrit is performed with tomographic techniques and a maximum-likelihood estimation method. For the tomographic reconstruction we used more than 2400 different projections. In this way we also demonstrate that we can perform any transformation in the three-dimensional space.     

Information trade-offs for optical quantum communication

Recent work has precisely characterized the achievable trade-offs between three key information processing tasks-classical communication (generation or consumption), quantum communication (generation or consumption), and shared entanglement (distribution or consumption), measured in bits, qubits, and ebits per channel use, respectively. Slices and corner points of this three-dimensional region reduce to well-known protocols for quantum channels. A trade-off coding technique can attain any point in the region and can outperform time sharing between the best-known protocols for accomplishing each information processing task by itself. Previously, the benefits of trade-off coding that had been found were too small to be of practical value (viz., for the dephasing and the universal cloning machine channels). In this Letter, we demonstrate that the associated performance gains are in fact remarkably high for several physically relevant bosonic channels that model free-space or fiber-optic links, thermal-noise channels, and amplifiers. We show that significant performance gains from trade-off coding also apply when trading photon-number resources between transmitting public and private classical information simultaneously over secret-key-assisted bosonic channels.     

Optomechanical transducers for long-distance quantum communication

We describe a new scheme to interconvert stationary and photonic qubits which is based on indirect qubit-light interactions mediated by a mechanical resonator. This approach does not rely on the specific optical response of the qubit and thereby enables optical quantum interfaces for a wide range of solid state spin and charge based systems. We discuss the implementation of state transfer protocols between distant nodes of a quantum network and show that high transfer fidelities can be achieved under realistic experimental conditions.     

Perturbative quantum error correction

We derive simple necessary and sufficient conditions under which a quantum channel obtained from an arbitrary perturbation from the identity can be reversed on a given code to the lowest order in fidelity. We find the usual Knill-Laflamme conditions applied to a certain operator subspace which, for a generic perturbation, is generated by the Lindblad operators. For a weak interaction with an environment, the error space to be corrected is a subspace of that spanned by the interaction operators, selected by the environment's initial state.     

Automatic quantum error correction

Criteria are given by which dissipative evolution in the weak coupling limit can transfer populations and coherences between quantum subspaces, without a loss of coherence. The result is a form of quantum error correction implemented by the joint evolution of a system with a cold bath. It requires no external intervention and, in principle, no ancilla. An example of such a system, consisting of three dipole ordered spin 1/2 particles in a resonator, is given. The qubit, or the triple quantum coherence of the spins, is protected against all spin-flip errors.     

Theory of quantum error correction for general noise

A measure of quality of an error-correcting code is the maximum number of errors that it is able to correct. We show that a suitable notion of "number of errors" e makes sense for any quantum or classical system in the presence of arbitrary interactions. Thus, e-error-correcting codes protect information without requiring the usual assumptions of independence. We prove the existence of large codes for both quantum and classical information. By viewing error-correcting codes as subsystems, we relate codes to irreducible representations of operator algebras and show that noiseless subsystems are infinite-distance error-correcting codes.