Rapid development of supercomputers and the prospect of quantum computers are posing increasingly serious threats to the security of communication. Using the principles of quantum mechanics, quantum communication offers provable security of communication and is a promising solution to counter such threats. Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) is one important branch of quantum communication. In contrast to other branches of quantum communication, it transmits secret information directly. Recently, remarkable progress has been made in proof-of-principle experimental demonstrations of QSDC. However, it remains a technical feat to bring QSDC into a practical application. Here, we report the implementation of a practical quantum secure communication system. The security is analyzed in the Wyner wiretap channel theory. The system uses a coding scheme of concatenation of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and works in a regime with a realistic environment of high noise and high loss. The present system operates with a repetition rate of 1 MHz at a distance of 1.5 kilometers. The secure communication rate is 50 bps, sufficient to effectively send text messages and reasonably sized files of images and sounds.

Due to the broadcast and time-varying natures of wireless channels, traditional communication systems that provide data encryption at the application layer suffer many challenges such as error diffusion. In this paper, we propose a code-hopping based secrecy transmission scheme that uses dynamic nonsystematic low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and automatic repeat-request (ARQ) mechanism to jointly encode and encrypt source messages at the physical layer. In this scheme, secret keys at the transmitter and the legitimate receiver are generated dynamically upon the source messages that have been transmitted successfully. During the transmission, each source message is jointly encoded and encrypted by a parity-check matrix, which is dynamically selected from a set of LDPC matrices based on the shared dynamic secret key. As for the eavesdropper (Eve), the uncorrectable decoding errors prevent her from generating the same secret key as the legitimate parties. Thus she cannot select the correct LDPC matrix to recover the source message. We demonstrate that our scheme can be compatible with traditional cryptosystems and enhance the security without sacrificing the error-correction performance. Numerical results show that the bit error rate (BER) of Eve approaches 0.5 as the number of transmitted source messages increases and the security gap of the system is small.

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The solution-aging treatment parameters, including solution temperature, cooling rate and aging temperature, have significant influences on the microstructures and comprehensive mechanical properties of titanium alloy. In this work, the detailed microevolution behaviors of Ti–10V–2Fe–3Al alloy under different solution and aging conditions have been investigated through a series of heat-treatment experiments. The results of solution-treatment experiments reveal that the content of αp-phase is reduced to zero as the solution temperature is raised to a certain α → β critical transformation point. Recrystallized β-grains can be observed at the solution temperature of 820°C. In addition, the cooling way (air cooling or water cooling) has little influence on the microevolution behaviors for this alloy during the solution-treatment process. As for the solution-aging-treatment experiments, the results reveal that αs-phases are precipitated from the supersaturated β-phase, and the fraction of αs-phase increases with increasing aging temperature. However, the precipitated α-grains intend to coalesce and coarsen as the aging temperature raises above 510°C. Therefore, the advocated solution-aging-treatment program is solution treatment at 820°C with air cooling followed by aging treatment at 510°C with air cooling.