Biased three-intensity decoy-state scheme on the measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution using heralded single-photon sources

Opt Express. 2018 Feb 19;26(4):4219-4229. doi: 10.1364/OE.26.004219.

Abstract

At present, most of the measurement-device-independent quantum key distributions (MDI-QKD) are based on weak coherent sources and limited in the transmission distance under realistic experimental conditions, e.g., considering the finite-size-key effects. Hence in this paper, we propose a new biased decoy-state scheme using heralded single-photon sources for the three-intensity MDI-QKD, where we prepare the decoy pulses only in X basis and adopt both the collective constraints and joint parameter estimation techniques. Compared with former schemes with WCS or HSPS, after implementing full parameter optimizations, our scheme gives distinct reduced quantum bit error rate in the X basis and thus show excellent performance, especially when the data size is relatively small.