English

Numerical simulations of atmospheric quantum channels

Quantum Physics 2023-10-02 v2 Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics Optics

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence is one of the lead disturbance factors for free-space quantum communication. The quantum states of light in such channels are affected by fluctuating losses characterized by the probability distribution of transmittance (PDT). We obtain the PDT for different horizontal links via numerical simulations of light transmission through the atmosphere. The results are compared with analytical models: the truncated log-normal distribution, the beam-wandering model, the elliptic-beam approximation, and the model based on the law of total probability. Their applicability is shown to be strongly dependent on the receiver aperture radius. We introduce an empirical model based on the Beta distribution, which is in good agreement with numerical simulations for a wide range of channel parameters. However, there are still scenarios where none of the above analytical models fits the numerically simulated data. The numerical simulation is then used to analyze the transmission of quadrature-squeezed light through free-space channels.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.10570,
  title  = {Numerical simulations of atmospheric quantum channels},
  author = {M. Klen and A. A. Semenov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10570},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

20 pages, 16 figures, the ancillary files contain numerically simulated data, an interactive tool for their visualization, and the corresponding Python 3 code