High-Capacity Quantum Summation with Single Photons in Both Polarization and Spatial-Mode Degrees of Freedom

In this paper, we employ single photons in both polarization and spatial-mode degrees of freedom to design a quantum summation protocol. We assume that the third party, i.e. TP, is semi-honest in our protocol. That TP is semi-honest means TP executes the protocol loyally, keeps a record of all its intermediate computations and might try to steal the participants’ private inputs from the record, but he cannot be corrupted by the adversary. Participants can independently encode their private inputs on the polarization states and the spatial-mode states of single photons. Thus our protocol doubles the capacity of quantum communication compared with those based on single photons with only one degree of freedom. In addition, our protocol is feasible as the preparation and the measurement of single-photon quantum states in both the polarization and the spatial-mode degrees of freedom are available with current quantum techniques. We also analyze its security in this paper.