Abstract Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is an approach of communication to transmitting secret messages based on quantum mechanics. Different from the quantum key distribution, secret messages can be transmitted directly on quantum channel with QSDC. Higher channel capacity and noise suppression capabilities are key to achieving longdistance quantum communication. Here we report a continuous-variable QSDC scheme based on mask-coding and orbital angular momentum, in which the mask-coding is employed to protect the security of the transmitting messages and to suppression the influence of excess noise. And the combination of orbital angular momentum and the information block transmission can effectively improve the secrecy capacity. In the 800 information blocks × 1310 bits length 10-km experiment, the results show that the statistical average of bit error rate reached 0.38%, and the system excess noise is 0.0184 SNU, and the final secrecy capacity is 6.319×106 bps. Therefore, this scheme reduces error bits while increasing secrecy capacity, providing a solution for long-distance large-scale quantum communication, which has capacity of transmitting text, images, and other information of reasonable size.
Read full abstract