Enhancing Quantum Key Distribution with Entanglement Distillation and Classical Advantage Distillation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel two-stage distillation scheme combining entanglement and classical advantage distillation, significantly improving quantum key distribution performance in noisy environments.

Contribution

It presents the first combined entanglement and classical advantage distillation scheme, demonstrating enhanced key rates and security bounds in high-noise quantum channels.

Findings

Achieves finite key rates in high-noise regimes

Outperforms individual distillation techniques in security bounds

Suitable for near-term quantum key distribution implementations

Abstract

Realizing secure communication between distant parties is one of quantum technology's main goals. Although quantum key distribution promises information-theoretic security for sharing a secret key, the key rate heavily depends on the level of noise in the quantum channel. To overcome the noise, both quantum and classical techniques exist, i.e., entanglement distillation and classical advantage distillation. So far, these techniques have only been used separately from each other. Herein, we present a two-stage distillation scheme concatenating entanglement distillation with classical advantage distillation. For advantage distillation, we utilize a fixed protocol, specifically, the repetition code; in the case of entanglement distillation, we employ an enumeration algorithm to find the optimal protocol. We test our scheme for different noisy entangled states and demonstrate its quantitative advantage: our two-stage distillation scheme achieves finite key rates even in the high-noise regime where entanglement distillation or advantage distillation alone cannot afford key sharing. We also calculate the security bounds for relevant QKD protocols with our key distillation scheme and show that they exceed the previous security bounds with only advantage distillation. Since the advantage distillation part does not introduce further requirements on quantum resources, the proposed scheme is well-suited for near-term quantum key distribution tasks.