Frequency drift corrected ultra-stable laser through phase-coherent fiber producing a quantum channel
Abstract
Phase coherent fibers (PCF) are essential to distribute nearly monochromatic photons, ultra-stable in their frequency and phases, which have demanding requirements for state-of-the-art networked experiments, quantum as well as very high-speed communications. We report the development of a novel system that produces PCF links, also actively corrects the unavoidable slow frequency drift of the source laser. The PCF follows white phase noise limited stability behavior having values and for a 3.3 km field-deployed and 71 km spool fibers, respectively, with up to 47.5 dB suppression of the phase noise compared to a normal fiber. Additionally, the system is featured to correct the source laser's 33.8 mHz/s frequency drift to as low as mHz/s. Therefore, this all-in-one solution producing a quantum link can potentially enhance the effectiveness of the twin field quantum key distribution (TF-QKD) by nearly a 73-fold reduction of the QBER that arises from using unstabilized fiber links, as well as relaxes the laser frequency drift correction constraints by severalfold.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.08419,
title = {Frequency drift corrected ultra-stable laser through phase-coherent fiber producing a quantum channel},
author = {Stanley Johnson and Sandeep Mishra and Anirban Pathak and Subhadeep De},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08419},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
We demonstrate the generation of a phase stabilized coherent optical fiber link using the in-house developed optical and electronic hardware. The developed system can simultaneously compensate the slow frequency drift of an ultra-stable source laser to 6.2 mHz/s using optical self-referencing and as low as 0.05 mHz/s using absolute optical frequency referencing techniques