An efficient implementation of the decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution with heralded single-photon sources

TL;DR

This paper presents an efficient implementation of decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution using heralded single-photon sources, achieving higher key rates and longer distances by combining triggered and non-triggered events.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel scheme that combines triggered and non-triggered events in decoy-state MDI-QKD with heralded sources, improving key rate and transmission distance.

Findings

Higher key rates achieved with combined triggered and non-triggered events.

Poisson distribution heralded sources outperform thermal sources in key rate.

The scheme extends secure transmission distance in practical QKD setups.

Abstract

We study the decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution using heralded single-photon sources. This has the advantage that the observed error rate in X basis is in higher order and not so large. We calculate the key rate and transmission distance for two cases: one using only triggered events, and the other using both triggered and non-triggered events. We compare the key rates of various protocols and find that our new scheme using triggered and non-triggered events can give higher key rate and longer secure distance. Moreover, we also show the different behavior of our scheme when using different heralded single-photon sources, i.e., in poisson or thermal distribution. We demonstrate that the former can generate a relatively higher secure key rate than the latter, and can thus work more efficiently in practical quantum key distributions.