Polarization demultiplexing for CV-QKD system based on Stokes space

Abstract

A polarization demultiplexing algorithm for continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) system based on Stokes space is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the CV-QKD system, the pilot tone and quantum signal is modulated on the two orthogonal states of polarization (SOP), respectively. Since the power of the pilot-tone is much higher than quantum signal, the received signals in Stokes space present a single cluster point. Therefore, the K-means algorithm is used to find the coordinate of the cluster point, and the polarization rotation angles can be obtained by the coordinate. The advantages of the proposed algorithm are fast convergence, simple computation and modulation format independence. Experimental results of 100 MHz pilot-tone-assisted Gaussian-modulated CV-QKD system with local local oscillator (LLO) are given, and the results show that the proposed algorithm split the pilot-tone and quantum signal effectively. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can track SOP scrambling of ≥3141.59 rad/s without sacrificing the performance of excess noise, which is satisfying for most scenarios of the LLO CV-QKD system.