It has been found that non-Gaussian operations can be applied to increase and distill entanglement between Gaussian entangled states. We show the successful use of the non-Gaussian operation, in particular, photon subtraction operation, on the continuous-variable measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (CV-MDI-QKD) protocol. The proposed method can be implemented based on existing technologies. Security analysis shows that the photon subtraction operation can remarkably increase the maximal transmission distance of the CV-MDI-QKD protocol, which precisely make up for the shortcoming of the original CV-MDI-QKD protocol, and 1-photon subtraction operation has the best performance. Moreover, the proposed protocol provides a feasible method for the experimental implementation of the CV-MDI-QKD protocol.
@article{arxiv.1711.05978,
title = {Continuous-variable measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution with photon subtraction},
author = {Hong-Xin Ma and Peng Huang and Dong-Yun Bai and Shi-Yu Wang and Wan-Su Bao and Gui-Hua Zeng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.05978},
year = {2018}
}