Guided acoustic wave Brillouin scattering (GAWBS) is a major obstacle in fiber-based quantum and high-speed classical communication systems as well as in interferometry. The transverse phonons driving it modulate the light field in the fiber core, adding thermal noise to the signal. To this day, there is no known method to eliminate GAWBS from the fiber or to compensate its effects completely. In this letter, we present twisted photonic crystal fibers (t-PCF) as the first-ever fiber system allowing a complete removal of mixed torsional radial GAWBS in a Stokes basis. The torsional radial modes modulate the fiber asymmetrically in the transverse direction, resulting in linear birefringence. While pure phase modulation is added as common noise in the guided fiber modes and can be easily removed through self-referencing, linear birefringence induces polarization modulation, which cannot be counteracted. In t-PCFs, the transverse symmetry of the geometry translates to multiple symmetries in the acoustic and optical domains in the circular basis. This enables equal phase accumulation in certain orientations in the two optical modes. Through experiments and theory, we show that the GAWBS-induced phase can be compensated down to the quantum-noise limit by self-referencing in a symmetric interferometer with Stokes detection.
Composable free-space continuous-variable quantum key distribution using discrete modulation
Kevin Jaksch,
Thomas Dirmeier,
Yannick Weiser,
Stefan Richter,
Oemer Bayraktar,
Bastian Hacker,
Conrad Rösler,
Imran Khan,
Stefan Petscharning, et al.
Science Advances
12
eadv1440
(2026)
| Journal
| PDF
Continuous-variable (CV) quantum key distribution (QKD) allows for quantum secure communication with the benefit of being close to classical coherent communication. In recent years, CV QKD protocols using a discrete number of displaced coherent states have been studied intensively as the modulation can be directly implemented with real devices with finite resolution. Until now, experiments only calculated key rates in the asymptotic regime. Here, we present a CV QKD system using discrete modulation that is especially designed for atmospheric channels. We use polarization encoding to exploit the nonbirefringent nature of the turbulent atmosphere. This allows to expand CV QKD networks beyond the existing fiber backbone. In a laboratory demonstration with a static 3-decibel loss channel, we implemented a recently developed security proof allowing to calculate composable finite-size key rates against independently and identically distributed collective attacks. We applied the full QKD protocol including a quantum random number generator, error correction, and privacy amplification to extract secret keys.
Contact
Research Group Christoph Marquardt
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light Staudtstr. 2 91058 Erlangen, Germany
