Heralded Single Photon Source-Based Decoy-State Quantum Key Distribution with Dual Detectors

Abstract

In practical quantum key distribution (QKD) systems, the heralded single photon source (HSPS) based on parametric down-conversion (PDC) has attracted significant attentions from many researchers because its various advantages compared to the weak coherent source. We propose a heralded single photon source-based decoy-state QKD with dual detectors and demonstrate in a theoretical simulation that this method improves the performance of QKD system. The secure key generation rate is increased significantly with our proposal both in thermal and Poisson distributions of photons. The secure key rate produced by our scheme is higher than the state of the art key rate of current high-speed QKD system. The decoy-state QKD system using the heralded single photon source with dual detectors can be an important alternative for the present practical QKD systems.

Afterpulsing Effect on the Baseline System Error Rate and on the Decoy-State Quantum Key Distribution Protocols

“…Compared to the theoretical outcomes in [14], as proved in [15] and also studied in [16], quiet (low noise), slow detectors exhibit similar or better performance than dual detectors at longer distances (longer than 100 km), while noisy detectors have similar performance compared to dual detectors. Hence, the case studied in our work performs the same or better for longer distances than dual detectors case because the latter suffers from lower efficiency values at these distances.…”