Self-error-rejecting quantum state transmission of entangled photons for faithful quantum communication without calibrated reference frames

¹ Department of Physics, Applied Optics Beijing Area Major Laboratory, Beijing Normal University Beijing 100875, China
² School of Science, Nanjing University of Science and Technology - Nanjing 210094, China
³ NAAM-Research Group, Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia

Received: 25 September 2019
Accepted: 9 October 2019

Abstract

We propose an alignment-free two-party polarization-entanglement transmission scheme for entangled photons by using only linear-optical elements, requiring neither ancillary photons nor calibrated reference frames. The scheme is robust against both the random channel noise and the instability of reference frames. Furthermore, the success probabilities for entanglement transmission are, in principle, improved to unity when active polarization controllers are used. The distinct characters of a simple structure, being easy to implement, and the high fidelity and efficiency make our protocol very useful for long-distance quantum communications and distributed quantum networks in practical applications. As an example, we give its application in a reference-frame-alignment-free quantum key distribution protocol with entanglement.