skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Entanglement-secured single-qubit quantum secret sharing

Journal Article · · Physical Review. A
; ; ;  [1]
  1. Department of Physics, Harvey Mudd College, 301 Platt Boulevard, Claremont, California 91711 (United States)

In single-qubit quantum secret sharing, a secret is shared between N parties via manipulation and measurement of one qubit at a time. Each qubit is sent to all N parties in sequence; the secret is encoded in the first participant's preparation of the qubit state and the subsequent participants' choices of state rotation or measurement basis. We present a protocol for single-qubit quantum secret sharing using polarization entanglement of photon pairs produced in type-I spontaneous parametric downconversion. We investigate the protocol's security against eavesdropping attack under common experimental conditions: a lossy channel for photon transmission, and imperfect preparation of the initial qubit state. A protocol which exploits entanglement between photons, rather than simply polarization correlation, is more robustly secure. We implement the entanglement-based secret-sharing protocol with 87% secret-sharing fidelity, limited by the purity of the entangled state produced by our present apparatus. We demonstrate a photon-number splitting eavesdropping attack, which achieves no success against the entanglement-based protocol while showing the predicted rate of success against a correlation-based protocol.

OSTI ID:
22068648
Journal Information:
Physical Review. A, Vol. 84, Issue 3; Other Information: (c) 2011 American Institute of Physics; Country of input: Syrian Arab Republic; ISSN 1050-2947
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English