Frequency drift corrected ultra-stable laser through phase-coherent fiber producing a quantum channel

Abstract

Phase coherent fibers (PCF) are essential to distribute nearly monochromatic photons, ultra-stable in their frequency and phases, which have demanding requirements for state-of-the-art networked experiments, quantum as well as very high-speed communications. We report the development of a novel system that produces PCF links, also actively corrects the unavoidable slow frequency drift of the source laser. The PCF follows white phase noise limited ${\sigma }_o\times {\tau }^{-1}$ stability behavior having ${\sigma }_o$ values $1.9(2)\times 10^{-16}$ and $2.6(1)\times 10^{-16}$ for a 3.3 km field-deployed and 71 km spool fibers, respectively, with up to 47.5 dB suppression of the phase noise compared to a normal fiber. Additionally, the system is featured to correct the source laser's 33.8 mHz/s frequency drift to as low as $\simeq 0.05$ mHz/s. Therefore, this all-in-one solution producing a quantum link can potentially enhance the effectiveness of the twin field quantum key distribution (TF-QKD) by nearly a 73-fold reduction of the QBER that arises from using unstabilized fiber links, as well as relaxes the laser frequency drift correction constraints by severalfold.

We demonstrate the generation of a phase stabilized coherent optical fiber link using the in-house developed optical and electronic hardware. The developed system can simultaneously compensate the slow frequency drift of an ultra-stable source laser to 6.2 mHz/s using optical self-referencing and as low as 0.05 mHz/s using absolute optical frequency referencing techniques

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