Quantum Key Distribution with Fibonacci Orbital Angular Momentum States

Abstract

Quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution (QKD) have been the most successful applications of quantum information processing, highlighting the unique capability of quantum mechanics, through the no-cloning theorem, to protect the security of shared encryption keys. Here we present a new and fundamentally different approach to high-capacity, high-efficiency QKD by exploiting interplay between cross-disciplinary ideas from quantum information and light scattering of aperiodic photonic media. The novelty of the proposed approach relies on a unique type of entangled-photon source and a new physical mechanism for efficiently sharing keys. The new source produces entangled photons with orbital angular momenta (OAM) randomly distributed among Fibonacci numbers. Combining entanglement with the mathematical properties of Fibonacci sequences leads to a new QKD protocol. This Fibonacci protocol is immune to photon-number-splitting attacks and allows secure generation of long keys from few photons. Unlike other protocols, reference frame alignment and active modulation of production and detection bases are unnecessary, since security does not require use of non-orthogonal polarization measurements.

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