Quantum communication with photons

TL;DR

This paper reviews the fundamental concepts, recent experimental progress, and emerging high-dimensional techniques in quantum communication, emphasizing its potential for unconditionally secure information transfer using photons.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of quantum communication principles, recent experimental advancements, and the promising high-dimensional approaches utilizing photon orbital angular momentum.

Findings

Recent experiments demonstrate secure information sharing using photon orbital angular momentum.

Ground and space-based quantum communication schemes have shown significant progress.

High-dimensional quantum communication offers increased data rates and enhanced security.

Abstract

The secure communication of information plays an ever increasing role in our society today. Classical methods of encryption inherently rely on the difficulty of solving a problem such as finding prime factors of large numbers and can, in principle, be cracked by a fast enough machine. The burgeoning field of quantum communication relies on the fundamental laws of physics to offer unconditional information security. Here we introduce the key concepts of quantum superposition and entanglement as well as the no-cloning theorem that form the basis of this field. Then, we review basic quantum communication schemes with single and entangled photons and discuss recent experimental progress in ground and space-based quantum communication. Finally, we discuss the emerging field of high-dimensional quantum communication, which promises increased data rates and higher levels of security than ever before. We discuss recent experiments that use the orbital angular momentum of photons for sharing large amounts of information in a secure fashion.