Abstract
Improvement in secure transmission of information is an urgent need for governments, corporations and individuals. Quantum key distribution (QKD) promises security based on the laws of physics and has rapidly grown from proof-of-concept to robust demonstrations and deployment of commercial systems. Despite these advances, QKD has not been widely adopted, and large-scale deployment will likely require chip-based devices for improved performance, miniaturization and enhanced functionality. Here we report low error rate, GHz clocked QKD operation of an indium phosphide transmitter chip and a silicon oxynitride receiver chip—monolithically integrated devices using components and manufacturing processes from the telecommunications industry. We use the reconfigurability of these devices to demonstrate three prominent QKD protocols—BB84, Coherent One Way and Differential Phase Shift—with performance comparable to state-of-the-art. These devices, when combined with integrated single photon detectors, pave the way for successfully integrating QKD into future telecommunications networks.
Highlights
Improvement in secure transmission of information is an urgent need for governments, corporations and individuals
While there have been individual demonstrations of time-bin decoding[14], miniaturization[15] and reconfigurability[4] in integrated devices, here we report Quantum key distribution (QKD) operation of complex devices that will allow the use of quantum secured communications in the applications described above
We implement a receiver (Fig. 1b), consisting of a photonic circuit with thermo-optic phase shifters (TOPS) and reconfigurable delay line in the silicon oxynitride (SiOxNy) platform and off-chip single photon detectors. Both photonic systems are manufactured using state-of-the-art industrial fabrication processes and are designed for multi-protocol reconfigurable operation, here we demonstrate three important QKD protocols: BB84, coherent one way (COW)[17] and differential phase shift (DPS)[18]
Summary
Improvement in secure transmission of information is an urgent need for governments, corporations and individuals. The complexity achievable with the integrated platform enables practical implementation of multi-protocol operation for flexibility, multiplexing for higher rates and additional monitoring and certification circuits to protect against side-channel attacks[1] in a fibre network.
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