The field of quantum information processing offers secure communication protected by the laws of quantum mechanics and is on the verge of finding wider application for information transfer of sensitive data. To overcome the obstacle of inadequate cost-efficiency, extensive research is being done on the many components required for high data throughput using quantum key distribution (QKD). Aiming for an application-oriented solution, we report on the realization of a multichannel QKD system for plug-and-play high-bandwidth secure communication at telecom wavelength. For this purpose, a rack-sized multichannel superconducting nanowire single photon detector (SNSPD) system, as well as a highly parallelized time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) unit have been developed and linked to an FPGA-controlled QKD evaluation setup allowing for continuous operation and achieving high secret key rates using a coherent-one-way protocol.
@article{arxiv.2207.07345,
title = {Ultrafast quantum key distribution using fully parallelized quantum channels},
author = {Robin Terhaar and Jasper Rödiger and Matthias Häußler and Michael Wahl and Helge Gehring and Martin A. Wolff and Fabian Beutel and Wladick Hartmann and Nicolai Walter and Jonas Hanke and Peter Hanne and Nino Walenta and Maximilian Diedrich and Nicolas Perlot and Max Tillmann and Tino Röhlicke and Mahdi Ahangarianabhari and Carsten Schuck and Wolfram H. P. Pernice},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2207.07345},
year = {2023}
}