Preservation of quantum key rate in the presence of decoherence

Abstract: It is well known that the interaction of quantum systems with the environment reduces the inherent quantum correlations. Under special circumstances the effect of decoherence can be reversed, for example, the interaction modeled by an amplitude damping channel can boost the teleportation fidelity from the classical to the quantum region for a bipartite quantum state. Here, we first show that this phenomena fails in the case of a quantum key distribution protocol. We further show that the technique of weak measurement can be used to slow down the process of decoherence, thereby helping to preserve the quantum key rate when one or both systems are interacting with the environment via an amplitude damping channel. Most interestingly, in certain cases weak measurement with post-selection where one considers both success and failure of the technique is shown to be more useful than without it when both systems interact with the environment.