Experimental study of continuous variable quantum key distribution

Abstract: It has been proven in the literature that the main technological factors limiting the communication rates of quantum cryptography systems by single photon are mainly related to the choice of the encoding method. In fact, the efficiency of the used sources is very limited, at best of the order of a few percent for the single photon sources and the photon counters can not be operated beyond a certain speed and with a low order of detection efficiency. In order to overcome partially these drawbacks, it is advantageous to use continuous quantum states as an alternative to standard encodings based on quantum qubits. In this context, we propose a new reconciliation method based on Turbo codes. Our theoretical model assumptions are supported by experimental results. Indeed, our method leads to a significant improvement of the protocol security and a large decrease of the QBER. The gain is obtained with a reasonable complexity increase. Also, the novelty of our work is that it tested the reconciliation method on a real photonic system under VPItransmissionMaker.