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Modulator-free coherent-one-way quantum key distribution

G. L. Roberts, M. Lucamarini, J. F. Dynes, S. J. Savory, Z. L. Yuan,∗ and A. J. Shields

whether it is high bit rate, long achievable

Time-bin encoding is an attractive method for transmitting photonic qubits distance, a rigorous security proof or sim-
over long distances with minimal decoherence. It allows a simple receiver for plicity in experimental implementation.
quantum key distribution (QKD) that extracts a key by measuring time of It is therefore highly beneficial to develop
arrival of photons and detects eavesdropping by measuring interference of a versatile QKD transmitter that can op-
erate different QKD protocols. Promis-
pulses in different time bins. In the past, coherent pulses have been ing work has recently been demonstrated
generated using a CW laser and an intensity modulator. A greatly simplified by combining a laser with a number of
transmitter is proposed and demonstrated here that works by directly external phase and intensity modulating
modulating the laser diode. Coherence between pulses is maintained by a elements.[10]
weak seed laser. The modulator-free source creates time-bin encoded pulses The modulator-free transmitter pro-
posed by Yuan et al[11] has a number
with a high extinction ratio (29.4 dB) and an interference visibility above 97 %.
of attractive properties for phase mod-
The resulting QKD transmitter gives estimated secure key rates up to ulation. The light source uses a pair of
4.57 Mbit/s, the highest yet reported for coherent-one-way QKD, and can be laser diodes in an optical injection con-
programmed for all protocols using weak coherent pulses. figuration. A master laser provides phase
modulation, and randomization when re-
quired, while the slave laser is respon-
sible for generating short optical pulses.
Quantum key distribution (QKD) uniquely allows two parties The light source has successfully been demonstrated for two
to exchange secure keys with secrecy guaranteed by the funda- important phase-encoded QKD protocols, BB84 and differential
mental laws of physics.[1] Its potential for real-world applications phase shift (DPS).[12] However, the suitability of a modulator-free
has stimulated a large amount of progress in developing imple- design to offer high extinction ratio intensity modulation in quan-
mentation technologies.[2] Over optical fiber links, QKD has been tum communications is yet to be explored.
demonstrated to distribute quantum keys with rates exceeding Here, we tackle this issue by implementing the coherent-one-
1 Mbit/s,[3] over a hundred kilometers of distance[4,5] and/or in way (COW) QKD protocol with a modulator-free transmitter. This
the presence of strong classical signals in the same fiber.[6] The transmitter allows us to achieve record-breaking key rates with
technology is being extensively tested in installed fiber network quantum bit error rates (QBERs) below 1 % and visibilities over
environments.[7] Moreover, satellite QKD and quantum repeater 97 %. Using a realistic finite key-size scenario, we can distribute
technologies are also being pursued to extend communication to keys from Alice to Bob at losses between 1.5 dB and 30 dB, equiv-
the global scale.[2] alent to 7.5 km and 150 km of standard single mode optical fiber.
Since the inception of QKD in 1984 with the Bennett-Brassard The COW protocol[4] uses time-bin encoding to share a key be-
(BB84) protocol,[8] a number of diverse implementations have tween two parties. Security of the key is ensured by Alice main-
been proposed. Two broad classes of protocol that share pop- taining a fixed coherence between pulses. Bob can measure the
ularity are discrete variable and distributed phase reference interference visibility between adjacent pulses using an interfer-
protocols.[9] The protocols within these classes have a variety of ometer and infer the presence of an eavesdropper, Eve, by a break
requirements for transmitters, for example phase modulation in the coherence. It has been used in a real-fiber system to trans-
and/or intensity modulation. Each provides different benefits, mit a secure key between two parties separated by 307 km - the
longest distance for any two party quantum protocol.[4] This is
G. L. Roberts, M. Lucamarini, J. F. Dynes, Z. L. Yuan, A. J. Shields possible because the time-bin encoding produces a lower QBER
Toshiba Research Europe Limited than other protocols, for example BB84.[3] The main downside to
208 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road
the protocol is that whilst security against a number of attacks
Cambridge, CB4 0GZ
United Kingdom has been demonstrated, no comprehensive security proof exists
G. L. Roberts, S. J. Savory for all families of attack,[9] which could mean the protocol is vul-
Cambridge University Engineering Department nerable to an all-powerful Eve.
9 J J Thomson Avenue In the COW protocol, Alice prepares two values of a logical
Cambridge, CB3 0FA bit using empty or full time bins: |β0  = |α|0 and |β1  = |0|α,
United Kingdom
∗ E-mail: [email protected] where |0 is the vacuum state and |α represents a coherent state
of light[13] with intensity μ=|α|2 . For these requirements, the
The ORCID identification number(s) for the author(s) of this article transmitter used in this protocol must be able to modulate in-
can be found under https://doi.org/10.1002/lpor.201700067
tensity whilst maintaining coherence. Bob decodes the signals
DOI: 10.1002/lpor.201700067

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1550.1 nm. The master laser is wavelength-tuned to give a

maximum coherence transfer, which occurs when both lasers
have the same free-running wavelength. The output pulses from
this system have a pulse width of 70 ps, which is much smaller
than the inverse modulation frequency, and a spectral width
of 0.10 nm. For time-bin encoding, a pseudo-random number
generator creates a repeated 512-bit sequence, generating decoy
sequences with a probability of 1 % and signal sequences for the
Figure 1. System schematics. The master laser in Alice injects CW light
remaining time bins equally distributed between the bit values 0
into the slave laser, which produces low-jitter gain-switched pulses. These and 1. The pattern generated is applied to gain-switch the slave
are then attenuated to the single photon level before being transmitted laser at a clock rate of 2 GHz, therefore implementing a COW
through the quantum channel to Bob. SPD1 detects the arrival time of transmitter at an effective bit-rate of 1 GHz. A high intensity
the photons, from which the key is generated, and SPD2 is used to mea- extinction ratio of 29.4 dB can be achieved between non-empty
sure the phase coherence. BS=beamsplitter; UMZI=unbalanced Mach- and empty pulses, thus ensuring a low encoding error in the
Zehnder interferometer; Att=attenuator.
time basis.
Optical injection ensures there is coherence among the gain-
switched slave pulses, as they all inherit the phase of the CW mas-
by measuring their arrival times with a single photon detector ter laser. The injected light transfers the coherence, thereby sup-
(SPD). He also takes a portion of the received photons in order to pressing the randomness of the phase that would occur if pulses
measure the coherence between adjacent time bins, allowing him were triggered by spontaneous emission.[16] To illustrate the phys-
to test the channel against unauthorized external intrusions. This ical principle, we gain-switch the slave laser to produce a 2 GHz
measurement is performed by overlapping two consecutive opti- pulse train and replace the SPD2 in figure 1 with an optical power
cal pulses on a beam splitter and measuring the resultant inter- meter to measure the interference fringe visibility, defined as
ference visibility. This is possible for the pulse sequence |β1 |β0 .
To increase the number of consecutive non-empty pulses, Alice Imax − Imin
V= , (1)
also prepares a decoy sequence |β2  = |α|α. This reduces the Imax + Imin
amount of bits Bob needs to collect before he can accurately mea-
sure the visibility, which is important in the finite key-size sce- where Imax and Imin are the average pulse intensities for con-
nario. Moreover, the decoy sequence is used as a security feature, structive and destructive interference respectively. The attenua-
as Eve does not know whether she is attacking a logical bit or a tor in figure 1 is set to maximum transmission, while a second
decoy sequence. During sifting, Alice informs Bob when she sent attenuator (not shown) is used to vary the seed optical power into
decoy pulses and Bob tells Alice whether he measured the arrival the slave laser. The interference visibility increases monotonically
time or the visibility of the optical pulses. with seed power, as a result of the increasing dominance of the
Figure 1 shows the experimental setup. The quantum trans- injected light over spontaneous emission in the slave laser cavity.
mitter (Alice) is configured for time-bin encoding using a slave The visibility saturates at 99.78 % with a seed power of 216 μW.
laser that is optically seeded by a master laser. An optical atten- In order to achieve a visibility of 99 %, a modest 12 μW of seed
uator attenuates the non-empty time bins to around 0.1 photons power is sufficient. In the subsequent QKD experiment, we use
per pulse before transmitting them through the quantum chan- a seed power of 50 μW to ensure the pulses are sub-100 ps.
nel, implemented by an optical attenuator, to the quantum re- The quantum transmitter and receiver are linked via a short
ceiver (Bob). Bob uses a 90:10 beamsplitter to passively route optical fiber and extra attenuation is applied to simulate the loss
most of the photons to a superconducting nanowire detector of the quantum channel. The transmitting photon flux is set to
(SPD1 ) for arrival time measurements. The remaining 10 % are 0.1 photons per non-empty pulse at the output of the transmitter.
fed into an unbalanced Mach-Zehnder interferometer (UMZI) At the lowest attenuation we decrease the photon flux to 0.07 pho-
for measuring the phase coherence with a second superconduct- tons per pulse to minimize time-jitter effects, as described later.
ing nanowire detector (SPD2 ). The UMZI is based on a planar In the QKD experiment, two channels of a digitizer with 100 ps
lightwave circuit with a differential delay of 500 ps and has a loss time resolution simultaneously record the arrival times of sin-
of 3 dB. A built-in heater allows direct control of the phase de- gle photons at the photon detectors (SPD1 and SPD2 ). Bob uses
lay across one arm. The superconducting nanowire SPDs used a 90:10 beamsplitter to passively direct most of the photons to
feature a dark count rate (DCR) of 10 Hz, alongside an efficiency SPD1 , where he sifts the key by measuring time-bins. The sifting
of 34 % at a wavelength of 1550 nm, allowing us to reach long loss here is minimal, caused only by the small portion of photons
distances. routed through the phase coherence measurement path. An ex-
Intensity-modulated gain-switched pulses are produced ample histogram measured by SPD1 is shown in figure 2(a), giv-
through electrical modulation of the slave laser at 3.3 V.[14,15] ing a QBER of less than 1 %. SPD2 is placed at the destructive out-
A DC bias above the lasing threshold is applied to the master put port of the interferometer to enable an accurate measurement
laser to ensure the phase is coherent when it is injected into of the visibility. To highlight the interference effect, we show in
the slave laser. We use a wavelength-tunable, continuous-wave figure 2(c) an example measurement from the constructive out-
fiber laser as the master laser and a semiconductor distributed put port of the interferometer. The height of constructive peaks
feedback (DFB) laser diode as the slave. The slave laser is is approximately four times that of the non-interfering peaks, as
kept at room temperature with a free-running wavelength of expected from first-order optical interference.

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Figure 2. Detected signals. Complementary signals received by Bob in a)

the time basis; b) the destructive arm of his interferometer; c) the con-
structive arm of his interferometer, measured using the SPDs. The trans-
mitted key for these patterns is |β0 , |β0 , |β1 , |β2 , |β1 , |β1 , |β0 , |β1 ,
where each logical bit is separated by a vertical grey line. Data is acquired
for 60 s in a quantum channel with 15 dB loss, with Alice transmitting 0.1
photons per pulse.

Each QKD session is continued until over 2×107 counts are

collected in the time basis. The QBER and visibility are collected
alongside the number of counts in each arm. The key rates are
calculated using the finite key size analysis derived by Korzh et
al[4] with a total security parameter of ε QK D = 10−10 . The key rate
dependence on visibility and number of photons per pulse, μ, is Figure 3. Experimental (symbols) and simulated (lines) key rates and
associated QBERs and visibilities. COW protocol with a finite key-size
given by
analysis.[4]

ζ = (2V − 1) × exp(−μ)
  1/2 (2) attribute this enhanced performance to the lower QBER enabled
− 2 1 − exp(−2μ) V (1 − V ) .
by our source, alongside high efficiency detectors.
The extracted key length is then calculated using We also plot the QBER and the interference visibility in
figure 3(b). These parameters give a direct evaluation of the per-
    1/2 formance of our light source as a quantum transmitter. Because
l = n 1 − Q − (1 − Q)h 1−ζ − 7 n log2 (β −1 )
2
 (3) the single photon detectors have negligible DCRs, we do not ex-
− f I R × h(Q) × n − log2 2εcor1 β 2 , pect a strong variation of QBER across the entire range of the
channel attenuation. This is indeed the case for attenuations
where n is the block size used for post processing, Q is the QBER, equal to and above 20 dB, where the QBER is measured at be-
h is the binary entropy function truncated to unity at input values low 0.15 %. This is low relative to other QKD protocols, which
over 0.5, β is optimised at ε QK D /4, f I R is the efficiency of informa- achieve QBERs of around 4 % at similar distances.[3,17] At the low-
tion reconciliation and εcor is the probability with which the key est channel attenuation of 1.5 dB, the QBER increases to 0.78 %.
is incorrect. The total measurement time increases with channel We attribute this QBER increase to the deterioration of the tim-
attenuation, although only 600 s are required at 30 dB channel ing jitter performance of the superconducting nanowire detec-
loss to collect the required number of counts. tors at high count rates, where the jitter increases from 40 ps
Figure 3(a) shows the estimated secure key rate as a function of to 90 ps. We also increase the time-bin width on the digitizer at
channel attenuation. This is the first time that megabit per sec- short distances to ensure all counts are measured. This deteriora-
ond estimated key rates have been shown using the COW pro- tion causes an overlap between the detected time-bins, as shown
tocol. These key rates are extracted in a finite key-size scenario, in figure 2(a), creating an ambiguity in the bit value of a photon.
attaining 4.57 Mbit/s at 1.5 dB of attenuation. As the channel at- The interference visibility does not suffer from the time jit-
tenuation increases, the secure key rate decreases exponentially. ter deterioration because the count rate of SPD2 is 30 times
At 20 dB of optical attenuation, equivalent to 100 km of ordinary lower than SPD1 . As shown in figure 2(b) and (c), the detection
optical fiber (0.2 dB/km loss), a secure key rate of 127.8 kbps is peaks are well separated from each other. We measure a visi-
delivered. This rate is ten times higher than that measured by bility of 97.81 % at 10 dB attenuation, illustrating high quality
Korzh et al[4] using the COW protocol at similar attenuations. We coherence transfer to the intensity-modulated pulses of the slave

Laser Photonics Rev. 2017, 1700067 1700067 (3 of 4) 

C 2017 by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
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laser. This value is lower than the master laser visibility because
the direct intensity modulation slightly weakens the indistin- [1] N. Gisin, G. Ribordy, W. Tittel, and H. Zbinden, Rev. Mod. Phys. 74
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(2015).
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[5] B. Fröhlich, M. Lucamarini, J. F. Dynes, L. C. Comandar, W. W-S. Tam,
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ity of a modulator-free QKD transmitter for the COW protocol. (2017).
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4.57 Mbit/s to 6.38 kbit/s over equivalent distances of 7.5 km to Yuan, R. V. Penty, and A. J. Shields, Appl. Phys. Lett. 104 (5), 051123
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Current work towards this has used bulky systems with a number Computer System and Signal Processing, IEEE, 1984, pp. 175–
179.
of active components. The system presented in this work would
[9] V. Scarani, H. Bechmann-Pasquinucci, N. J. Cerf, M. Dušek,
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easily adopted with firmware updates. An example of this would (2017).
be an extension to the COW protocol that incorporates block-wise [11] Z. L. Yuan, B Föhlich, M Lucamarini, G. L. Roberts, J. F. Dynes, and
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[13] R. Loudon, The quantum theory of light (OUP Oxford, 2000).
Acknowledgments [14] Z. Liu, J. Kakande, B. Kelly, J. O’Carroll, R. Phelan, D. J. Richardson,
G. L. R. Acknowledges financial support via the EPSRC funded CDT in In- and R. Slavik, Nat. Comms. 5, 5911 (2014).
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S.W.-B. Tam, Z. L. Yuan, R. V. Penty, and A. J. Shields, Nat. Photonics.
10, 312 (2016).
Keywords [17] M. Lucamarini, K. A. Patel, J. F. Dynes, B. Fröhlich, A. W. Sharpe, A. R.
Optical communications, quantum key distribution, fiber optic communi- Dixon, Z. L. Yuan, R. V. Penty, and A. J. Shields, Opt. Express 21 (21),
cations, quantum optics, COW protocol 24550 (2013).
[18] C. C. Lin, Y. C Chi, H. C. Kuo, P. C. Peng, C. J. Chang-Hasnain, and G.
R. Lin, J. Lightw.Technol. 29, 830 (2011).
Received: March 20, 2017
Revised: May 26, 2017 [19] K. Tamaki, M. Koashi, and G. Kato, arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.1995
Published online: June 27, 2017 (2012).

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