English

Frequency drift corrected ultra-stable laser through phase-coherent fiber producing a quantum channel

Quantum Physics 2026-02-05 v1

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 σo×τ1\sigma_o \times \tau^{-1} stability behavior having σo\sigma_o values 1.9(2)×10161.9(2) \times 10^{-16} and 2.6(1)×10162.6(1) \times 10^{-16} 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 0.05\simeq 0.05 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