Reversal operator to compensate polarization random drifts in quantum communications.

Abstract

A quantum bit error rate (QBER) based algorithm for polarization random drift compensation is proposed. For a transmission window of 8 ms, for instance in aerial fiber installations, the algorithm overhead is below 1%. In an extreme turbulent situation, where the transmission window is as shorter as 0.8 ms, the overhead is still below 10%. Besides being able to operate smoothly, even in a very extreme situation, the algorithm overhead is also insensitive to the length of the communication system. It is upper layer protocol agnostic, and it is based on the mapping of the QBER on the Poincaré sphere. The algorithm finds the polarization reversal operator, which results in much lower overhead contrary to the blind methods currently used. The algorithm reverts the polarization random drift performing two QBER estimations and applying three rotations, at most. The uncertainty on the two QBER estimations defines an area over the sphere surface that is related with upper-layer protocols QBER threshold.