Xiao Hu

Silicon-based polarization-encoding quantum key distribution (QKD) has been extensively studied due to its advantageous characteristics of its low cost and robustness. However, given the difficulty of fabricating polarized independent components on the chip, previous studies have only adopted off-chip devices to demodulate the quantum states or perform polarization compensation. In the current work, a fully chip-based decoder for polarization-encoding QKD was proposed. The chip realized a polarization state analyzer and compensated for the BB84 protocol without the requirement of additional hardware, which was based on a polarization-to-path conversion method utilizing a polarization splitter-rotator. The chip was fabricated adopting a standard silicon photonics foundry, which was of a compact design and suitable for mass production. In the experimental stability test, an average quantum bit error rate of 0.59% was achieved through continuous operation for 10 h without any polarization feedback. Furthermore, the chip enabled the automatic compensation of the fiber polarization drift when utilizing the developed feedback algorithm, which was emulated by a random fiber polarization scrambler. Moreover, a finite-key secret rate of 240 bps over a fiber spool of 100 km was achieved in the case of the QKD demonstration. This study marks an important step toward the integrated, practical, and large-scale deployment of QKD systems.

Integrated photonics provides a promising platform for quantum key distribution (QKD) system in terms of miniaturization, robustness and scalability. Tremendous QKD works based on integrated photonics have been reported. Nonetheless, most current chip-based QKD implementations require additional off-chip hardware to demodulate quantum states or perform auxiliary tasks such as time synchronization and polarization basis tracking. Here, we report a demonstration of resource-efficient chip-based BB84 QKD with a silicon-based encoder and decoder. In our scheme, the time synchronization and polarization compensation are implemented relying on the preparation and measurement of the quantum states generated by on-chip devices, thus no need additional hardware. The experimental tests show that our scheme is highly stable with a low intrinsic QBER of 0.50 ± 0.02% in a 6-h continuous run. Furthermore, over a commercial fiber channel up to 150 km, the system enables realizing secure key distribution at a rate of 866 bps. Our demonstration paves the way for low-cost, wafer-scale manufactured QKD system.