Abstract
We report on the performance of a compact photon pair source that was recovered intact from a failed space launch. The source had been embedded in a nanosatellite and was designed to perform pathfinder experiments leading to global quantum communication networks using spacecraft. Despite the launch vehicle explosion soon after takeoff, the nanosatellite was successfully retrieved from the accident site and the source within it was found to be fully operational. We describe the assembly technique for the rugged source. Post-recovery data is compared to baseline measurements collected before the launch attempt and no degradation in brightness or polarization correlation was observed. The survival of the source through an extreme environment provides strong evidence that it is possible to engineer rugged quantum optical systems.
Highlights
We report on the performance of a compact photon pair source that was recovered intact from a failed space launch
Entanglement-based QKD1 is a powerful technique that relies on the quantum entanglement between photons
We have proposed that a cost-effective approach to this challenge is to capitalize on emerging nanosatellite technology such as CubeSats[11] in order to perform technology validation experiments in small iterative steps[12]
Summary
We report on the performance of a compact photon pair source that was recovered intact from a failed space launch. Opto-electronics components such as single photon detectors and polarization analyzers had to be validated in a space environment. As a first step towards these validation experiments a science package that comprised of a correlated photon pair source (utilizing only one SPDC crystal) and all the necessary electronics was assembled.
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