Surpassing the repeaterless bound is a crucial task on the way towards realizing long-distance quantum key distribution. In this paper, we focus on the protocol proposed by Azuma et al. in [Nature Communications 6, 10171 (2015)], which can beat this bound with idealized devices. We investigate the robustness of this protocol against imperfections in realistic setups, particularly the multiple-photon pair components emitted by practical entanglement sources. In doing so, we derive necessary conditions on the photon-number statistics of the sources in order to beat the repeaterless bound. We show, for instance, that parametric down-conversion sources do not satisfy the required conditions and thus cannot be used to outperform this bound.
@article{arxiv.1908.04539,
title = {Beating the repeaterless bound with adaptive measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution},
author = {Róbert Trényi and Koji Azuma and Marcos Curty},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.04539},
year = {2020}
}