A main type of obstacles of practical applications of quantum key distribution (QKD) network is various attacks on detection. Measurement-device-independent QKD (MDIQKD) protocol is immune to all these attacks and thus a strong candidate for network security. Recently, several proof-of-principle demonstrations of MDIQKD have been performed. Although novel, those experiments are implemented in the laboratory with secure key rates less than 0.1 bps. Besides, they need manual calibration frequently to maintain the system performance. These aspects render these demonstrations far from practicability. Thus, justification is extremely crucial for practical deployment into the field environment. Here, by developing an automatic feedback MDIQKD system operated at a high clock rate, we perform a field test via deployed fiber network of 30 km total length, achieving a 16.9 bps secure key rate. The result lays the foundation for a global quantum network which can shield from all the detection-side attacks.
@article{arxiv.1408.2330,
title = {Field Test of Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution},
author = {Yan-Lin Tang and Hua-Lei Yin and Si-Jing Chen and Yang Liu and Wei-Jun Zhang and Xiao Jiang and Lu Zhang and Jian Wang and Li-Xing You and Jian-Yu Guan and Dong-Xu Yang and Zhen Wang and Hao Liang and Zhen Zhang and Nan Zhou and Xiongfeng Ma and Teng-Yun Chen and Qiang Zhang and Jian-Wei Pan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1408.2330},
year = {2014}
}