Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) are a key technology to enable the development of quantum communication systems of reduced size, cost and power consumption. Our goal is to realize high performance QKD systems based on quantum photonic chips. For this we develop high bit rate quantum random number generators, QKD transmitters and QKD receivers, all integrated onto small footprint PICs.
The optical components needed for QKD can be miniaturized and integrated onto millimeter scale semiconductor chips. Photonic integration enables volume production at low cost and high reproducibility, offering the prospect of wide scale deployment of quantum communication in the live.
By using commercial fabrication techniques, we develop high performance photonic chips implementing the core QKD function. This is combined with drive electronics that allows the quantum transmitter and receiver chips to exchange photonic qubits in real time.
By integrating the QRNG and QKD transmitter and receiver chips, and their associated drive electronics, with digital control circuitry, we realised the first fully functional QKD system based on PICs. The excellence performance of this system validates our approach for enabling mass manufacture of QKD hardware.
A photonic integrated quantum secure communication system, T. K. Paraïso et al., Nature Photonics, 2021.
A modulator-free quantum key distribution transmitter chip, T.K. Paraïso et al., NPJ Quant. Inf., 2019.
Real-time interferometric quantum random number generation on chip, T. Roger et al., JOSAB, 2019.
Davide G. Marangon, Peter R. Smith, Nathan Walk, Taofiq K. Paraïso, James F. Dynes, Victor Lovic, Mirko Sanzaro, Thomas Roger, Innocenzo De Marco, Marco Lucamarini, Zhiliang Yuan & Andrew J. Shields
J. A. Dolphin T, ENG, T. K. Paraïso T, H. Du T, R. I. Woodward T, D. G. Marangon T and A. J. Shields T