Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution of multiple degrees of freedom of a single photon

Abstract

Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) provides us a powerful approach to resist all attacks at detection side. Besides the unconditional security, people also seek for high key generation rate, but MDI-QKD has relatively low key generation rate. In this paper, we provide an efficient approach to increase the key generation rate of MDI-QKD by adopting multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs) of single photons to generate keys. Compared with other high-dimension MDI-QKD protocols encoding in one DOF, our protocol is more flexible, for our protocol generating keys in independent subsystems and the detection failure or error in a DOF not affecting the information encoding in other DOFs. Based on above features, our MDI-QKD protocol may have potential application in future quantum communication field.