Detector-integrated on-chip QKD receiver for GHz clock rates
Fabian Beutel, Helge Gehring, Martin A. Wolff, Carsten Schuck, Wolfram H. P. Pernice
Abstract
Abstract Quantum key distribution (QKD) can greatly benefit from photonic integration, which enables implementing low-loss, alignment-free, and scalable photonic circuitry. At the same time, superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPD) are an ideal detector technology for QKD due to their high efficiency, low dark-count rate, and low jitter. We present a QKD receiver chip featuring the full photonic circuitry needed for different time-based protocols, including single-photon detectors. By utilizing waveguide-integrated SNSPDs we achieve low dead times together with low dark-count rates and demonstrate a QKD experiment at 2.6 GHz clock rate, yielding secret-key rates of 2.5 Mbit/s for low channel attenuations of 2.5 dB without detector saturation. Due to the broadband 3D polymer couplers the reciver chip can be operated at a wide wavelength range in the telecom band, thus paving the way for highly parallelized wavelength-division multiplexing implementations.