Secure Quantum Communication With the Preservation of Optimal Measurements

One of the consequences in the distribution of quantum states over a long distance is that, since resulting quantum states are noisy due to the intervention of an environment, a measurement setting should be re-aligned to optimize detection events, for which additional experimental resources such as quantum tomography of a channel or resulting states is necessary. In this work, we present a protocol for protecting an optimal measurement setup without verifying a channel. A receiver does not have to revise the measurement prepared in a noiseless scenario since it would remain optimal for quantum states resulting from an unknown and noisy channel. The measurement protection protocol realizes a supermap describing transformations over quantum channels and is experimentally feasible as it only applies local unitary transformations before and after the transmission. We present experimental proof-of-principle demonstrations of the measurement protection protocol. We also apply the measurement protection to a prepare-and-measure protocol, the Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) protocol, and find that preserving an optimal measurement can suppress quantum-bit error rates, allowing the protocol to tolerate an even higher noise during transmission. The BB84 protocol with the measurement protection is experimentally demonstrated with the polarization encoding on photonic qubits.