High-order encoding schemes for floodlight quantum key distribution

TL;DR

This paper investigates high-order encoding schemes for floodlight quantum key distribution, demonstrating that 32-ary phase-shift keying significantly increases secret-key rates, while certain QAM schemes do not improve SKR.

Contribution

It shows that high-order phase-shift keying can substantially enhance SKR in FL-QKD, providing a theoretical basis for improved quantum communication protocols.

Findings

32-ary phase-shift keying doubles SKR to 4.5 Gbit/s

QAM modulation does not improve SKR beyond BPSK

High-order encoding schemes can significantly increase SKR in FL-QKD

Abstract

Floodlight quantum key distribution (FL-QKD) has realized a 1.3\,Gbit/s secret-key rate (SKR) over a 10-dB-loss channel against a frequency-domain collective attack [Quantum~Sci.~Technol. {\bf 3}, 025007 (2018)]. It achieved this remarkable SKR by means of binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) of multiple optical modes. Moreover, it did so with available technology, and without space-division or wavelength-division multiplexing. In this paper we explore whether replacing FL-QKD's BPSK modulation with a high-order encoding can further increase that protocol's SKR. First, we show that going to $K$-ary phase-shift keying with $K = 32$ doubles---from 2.0 to 4.5\,Gbit/s---the theoretical prediction from [Phys.~Rev.~A {\bf 94}, 012322 (2016)] for FL-QKD's BPSK SKR on a 50-km-long fiber link. Second, we show that $2d\times 2d$ quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) does not offer any SKR improvement beyond what its $d=1$ case---which is equivalent to quadrature phase-shift keying---provides.