Finite-size security of continuous-variable quantum key distribution with digital signal processing.

In comparison to conventional discrete-variable (DV) quantum key distribution (QKD), continuous-variable (CV) QKD with homodyne/heterodyne measurements has distinct advantages of lower-cost implementation and affinity to wavelength division multiplexing. On the other hand, its continuous nature makes it harder to accommodate to practical signal processing, which is always discretized, leading to lack of complete security proofs so far. Here we propose a tight and robust method of estimating fidelity of an optical pulse to a coherent state via heterodyne measurements.

Repeaterless quantum key distribution with efficient finite-key analysis overcoming the rate-distance limit.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) over a point-to-point link enables us to benefit from a genuine quantum effect even with conventional optics tools such as lasers and photon detectors, but its capacity is limited to a linear scaling of the repeaterless bound. Recently, twin-field (TF) QKD was conjectured to beat the limit by using an untrusted central station conducting a single-photon interference detection. So far, the effort to prove the conjecture was confined to the infinite key limit which neglected the time and cost for monitoring an adversary's act.

Rigorous characterization method for photon-number statistics.

Characterization of photon statistics of a light source is one of the most basic tools in quantum optics. Existing methods rely on an implicit and unverifiable assumption that the source never emits too many photons to stay within the measuring range of the detectors. As a result, they fail to fulfill the demand arising from emerging applications of quantum information such as quantum cryptography.

Polarization insensitive frequency conversion for an atom-photon entanglement distribution via a telecom network.

Long-lifetime quantum storages accessible to the telecom photonic infrastructure are essential to long-distance quantum communication. Atomic quantum storages have achieved subsecond storage time corresponding to 1000 km transmission time for a telecom photon through a quantum repeater algorithm. However, the telecom photon cannot be directly interfaced to typical atomic storages.

High-fidelity entanglement swapping and generation of three-qubit GHZ state using asynchronous telecom photon pair sources.

We experimentally demonstrate a high-fidelity entanglement swapping and a generation of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state using polarization-entangled photon pairs at telecommunication wavelength produced by spontaneous parametric down conversion with continuous-wave pump light. While spatially separated sources asynchronously emit photon pairs, the time-resolved photon detection guarantees the temporal indistinguishability of photons without active timing synchronizations of pump lasers and/or adjustment of optical paths. In the experiment, photons are sufficiently narrowed by fiber-based Bragg gratings with the central wavelengths of 1541 nm & 1580 nm, and detected by superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors with low timing jitters.

Efficient Simulation of Quantum Error Correction Under Coherent Error Based on the Nonunitary Free-Fermionic Formalism.

In order to realize fault-tolerant quantum computation, a tight evaluation of the error threshold under practical noise models is essential. While non-Clifford noise is ubiquitous in experiments, the error threshold under non-Clifford noise cannot be efficiently treated with known approaches. We construct an efficient scheme for estimating the error threshold of the one-dimensional quantum repetition code under non-Clifford noise.

Mach-Zehnder interferometer using frequency-domain beamsplitter.

We demonstrate a first-order interference between coherent light at 1580 nm and 795 nm by using a frequency-domain Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI). The MZI is implemented by two frequency-domain BSs based on a second-order nonlinear optical effect in a periodically-poled lithium niobate waveguide with a strong pump light. The observed visibility is over 0.

High visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel interference via a time-resolved coincidence measurement.

A high visibility Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference between two independently prepared photons plays an important role in various photonic quantum information processing. In a standard HOM experiment using photons generated by pulse-pumped spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC), larger detection time windows than the coherence time of photons have been employed for measuring the HOM visibility and/or drawing the HOM dip. If large amounts of stray photons continuously exist within the detection time windows, employing small detection time windows is favorable for reducing the effect of background noises.

Experimental demonstration of robust entanglement distribution over reciprocal noisy channels assisted by a counter-propagating classical reference light.

Embedding a quantum state in a decoherence-free subspace (DFS) formed by multiple photons is one of the promising methods for robust entanglement distribution of photonic states over collective noisy channels. In practice, however, such a scheme suffers from a low efficiency proportional to transmittance of the channel to the power of the number of photons forming the DFS. The use of a counter-propagating coherent pulse can improve the efficiency to scale linearly in the channel transmission, but it achieves only protection against phase noises.

Extracting an entangled photon pair from collectively decohered pairs at a telecommunication wavelength.

We experimentally demonstrated entanglement extraction scheme by using photons at the telecommunication band for optical-fiber-based quantum communications. We generated two pairs of non-degenerate polarization entangled photons at 780 nm and 1551 nm by spontaneous parametric down-conversion and distributed the two photons at 1551 nm through a collective phase damping channel which gives the same amount of random phase shift on the two photons. Through local operation and classical communication, we extracted an entangled photon pair from two phase-disturbed photon pairs.

Frequency down-conversion of 637 nm light to the telecommunication band for non-classical light emitted from NV centers in diamond.

We demonstrate a low-noise frequency down-conversion of photons at 637 nm to the telecommunication band at 1587 nm by the difference frequency generation in a periodically-poled lithium niobate. An internal conversion efficiency of the converter is estimated to be 0.44 at the maximum which is achieved by a pump power of 0.

Practical quantum key distribution protocol without monitoring signal disturbance.

Quantum cryptography exploits the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics to provide a secure way to exchange private information. Such an exchange requires a common random bit sequence, called a key, to be shared secretly between the sender and the receiver. The basic idea behind quantum key distribution (QKD) has widely been understood as the property that any attempt to distinguish encoded quantum states causes a disturbance in the signal.

Observation of two output light pulses from a partial wavelength converter preserving phase of an input light at a single-photon level.

We experimentally demonstrate that both of the two output light pulses of different wavelengths from a wavelength converter with various branching ratios preserve phase information of an input light at a single-photon level. In our experiment, we converted temporally-separated two coherent light pulses with average photon numbers of ∼ 0.1 at 780 nm to light pulses at 1522 nm by using difference-frequency generation in a periodically-poled lithium niobate waveguide.

Wide-band quantum interface for visible-to-telecommunication wavelength conversion.

Although near-infrared photons in telecommunication bands are required for long-distance quantum communication, various quantum information tasks have been performed by using visible photons for the past two decades. Recently, such visible photons from diverse media including atomic quantum memories have also been studied. Optical frequency down-conversion from visible to telecommunication bands while keeping the quantum states is thus required for bridging such wavelength gaps.

Efficient decoherence-free entanglement distribution over lossy quantum channels.

We propose and demonstrate a scheme for boosting the efficiency of entanglement distribution based on a decoherence-free subspace over lossy quantum channels. By using backward propagation of a coherent light, our scheme achieves an entanglement-sharing rate that is proportional to the transmittance T of the quantum channel in spite of encoding qubits in multipartite systems for the decoherence-free subspace. We experimentally show that highly entangled states, which can violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt inequality, are distributed at a rate proportional to T.

Demonstration of local expansion toward large-scale entangled webs.

We demonstrate an optical gate that increases the size of polarization-based W states by accessing only one of the qubits. Using this gate, we have generated three-photon and four-photon W states with fidelities 0.836 ± 0.

Local transformation of two einstein-podolsky-rosen photon pairs into a three-photon w state.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a transformation of two Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen photon pairs distributed among three parties into a three-photon W state using local operations and classical communication. We then characterize the final state using quantum state tomography on the three-photon state and on its marginal bipartite states. The fidelity of the final state to the ideal W state is 0.

Fidelity criterion for quantum-domain transmission and storage of coherent states beyond the unit-gain constraint.

We generalize the experimental success criterion for quantum teleportation (memory) in continuous-variable quantum systems to be suitable for a non-unit-gain condition by considering attenuation (amplification) of the coherent-state amplitude. The new criterion can be used for a nonideal quantum memory and long distance quantum communication as well as quantum devices with amplification process. It is also shown that the framework to measure the average fidelity is capable of detecting all Gaussian channels in the quantum domain.

Generation of high-fidelity four-photon cluster state and quantum-domain demonstration of one-way quantum computing.

We experimentally demonstrate a simple scheme for generating a four-photon entangled cluster state with fidelity over 0.860+/-0.015.

Simple and efficient quantum key distribution with parametric down-conversion.

We propose an efficient quantum key distribution protocol based on the photon-pair generation from parametric down-conversion (PDC). It uses the same experimental setup as the conventional protocol, but a refined data analysis enables detection of photon-number splitting attacks by utilizing information from a built-in decoy state. Assuming the use of practical detectors, we analyze the unconditional security of the new scheme and show that it improves the secure key generation rate by several orders of magnitude at long distances, using a high intensity PDC source.

Unconditional security of coherent-state quantum key distribution with a strong phase-reference pulse.

We prove the unconditional security of a quantum key distribution protocol in which bit values are encoded in the phase of a weak coherent-state pulse relative to a strong reference pulse. In contrast with implementations in which a weak pulse is used as a substitute for a single-photon source, the achievable key rate is found to decrease only linearly with the transmission of the channel.

Unconditionally secure key distribution based on two nonorthogonal states.

We prove the unconditional security of the Bennett 1992 protocol, by using a reduction to an entanglement distillation protocol initiated by a local filtering process. The bit errors and the phase errors are correlated after the filtering, and we can bound the amount of phase errors from the observed bit errors by an estimation method involving nonorthogonal measurements. The angle between the two states shows a trade-off between accuracy of the estimation and robustness to noises.

Secure quantum key distribution with an uncharacterized source.

We prove the security of the Bennett-Brassard (BB84) quantum key distribution protocol for an arbitrary source whose averaged states are basis independent, a condition that is automatically satisfied if the source is suitably designed. The proof is based on the observation that, to an adversary, the key extraction process is equivalent to a measurement in the sigma(x) basis performed on a pure sigma(z)-basis eigenstate. The dependence of the achievable key length on the bit error rate is the same as that established by Shor and Preskill [Phys.

Experimental extraction of an entangled photon pair from two identically decohered pairs.

Entanglement is considered to be one of the most important resources in quantum information processing schemes, including teleportation, dense coding and entanglement-based quantum key distribution. Because entanglement cannot be generated by classical communication between distant parties, distribution of entangled particles between them is necessary. During the distribution process, entanglement between the particles is degraded by the decoherence and dissipation processes that result from unavoidable coupling with the environment.

Configuration of separability and tests for multipartite entanglement in bell-type experiments.

We derive tight quadratic inequalities for all kinds of hybrid separable-inseparable n-particle density operators on an arbitrary dimensional space. This methodology enables us to derive a tight quadratic inequality as tests for full n-partite entanglement in various Bell-type correlation experiments on the systems that may not be identified as a collection of qubits, e.g.