Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution with source state errors in photon number space

Abstract

The existing decoy-state MDI-QKD theory assumes the perfect control of the source states which is a an impossible task for any real setup. In this paper, we study the decoy-state MDI-QKD method with source errors without any presumed conditions and we get the final security key rate only with the range of a few parameters in the source state.

Published in PRA in Dec. 2016. We present formula for the MDIQKD with an unstable source, i.e., in the case there are intensity errors. Our general formula applies to almost all types of sources, such as WCS, HSPS, the passive decoy state protocol and so on. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1710.08211