Simulation and implementation of decoy state quantum key distribution over 60km telecom fiber

Abstract

Decoy state quantum key distribution (QKD) has been proposed as a novel approach to improve dramatically both the security and the performance of practical QKD setups. Recently, many theoretical efforts have been made on this topic and have theoretically predicted the high performance of decoy method. However, the gap between theory and experiment remains open. In this paper, we report the first experiments on decoy state QKD, thus bridging the gap. Two protocols of decoy state QKD are implemented: one-decoy protocol over 15km of standard telecom fiber, and weak+vacuum protocol over 60km of standard telecom fiber. We implemented the decoy state method on a modified commercial QKD system. The modification we made is simply adding commercial acousto-optic modulator (AOM) on the QKD system. The AOM is used to modulate the intensity of each signal individually, thus implementing the decoy state method. As an important part of implementation, numerical simulation of our set-up is also performed. The simulation shows that standard security proofs give a zero key generation rate at the distance we perform decoy state QKD (both 15km and 60km). Therefore decoy state QKD is necessary for long distance secure communication. Our implementation shows explicitly the power and feasibility of decoy method, and brings it to our real-life. © 2006 IEEE.