arXiv subjects

Pascal Lefebvre

Publications and source records attributed to Pascal Lefebvre.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Energetic Analysis of Emerging Quantum Communication Protocols

With the rapid development and early industrialization of quantum technologies, it is of great interest to analyze their overall energy consumption before planning for their wide-scale deploy- ments. The evaluation of the total energy requirements of quantum networks is a challenging task: different networks require very disparate techniques to create, distribute, manipulate, detect, and process quantum signals. This paper aims to lay the foundations of a framework to model the energy requirements of different quantum technologies and protocols applied to near-term quantum networks. The energy efficiency of communication protocols is defined and a benchmark on the energy consumption of bipartite and multipartite network protocols is presented. An open-source software to estimate the energy consumption of photonic setups is also provided.

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arXiv2024

Realizing a Compact, High-Fidelity, Telecom-Wavelength Source of Multipartite Entangled Photons

Multipartite entangled states are an essential building block for advanced quantum networking applications. Realizing such tasks in practice puts stringent requirements on the characteristics of the states in terms of fidelity and generation rate, along with a desired compatibility with telecommunication network deployment. Here, we demonstrate a photonic platform design capable of producing high-fidelity Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, at telecom wavelength and in a compact and scalable configuration. Our source relies on spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a layered Sagnac interferometer, which only requires a single nonlinear crystal. This enables the generation of highly indistinguishable photon pairs, leading by entanglement fusion to four-qubit polarization-entangled GHZ states with fidelity up to $(94.73 \pm 0.21)\%$ with respect to the ideal state, at a rate of 1.7Hz. We provide a complete characterization of our source and highlight its suitability for practical quantum network applications.

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arXiv2024

A Practical Protocol for Quantum Oblivious Transfer from One-Way Functions

We present a new simulation-secure quantum oblivious transfer (QOT) protocol based on one-way functions in the plain model. With a focus on practical implementation, our protocol surpasses prior works in efficiency, promising feasible experimental realization. We address potential experimental errors and their correction, offering analytical expressions to facilitate the analysis of the required quantum resources. Technically, we achieve simulation security for QOT through an equivocal and relaxed-extractable quantum bit commitment.

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arXiv2023

Experimentally Certified Transmission of a Quantum Message through an Untrusted and Lossy Quantum Channel via Bell's Theorem

Quantum transmission links are central elements in essentially all protocols involving the exchange of quantum messages. Emerging progress in quantum technologies involving such links needs to be accompanied by appropriate certification tools. In adversarial scenarios, a certification method can be vulnerable to attacks if too much trust is placed on the underlying system. Here, we propose a protocol in a device independent framework, which allows for the certification of practical quantum transmission links in scenarios where minimal assumptions are made about the functioning of the certification setup. In particular, we take unavoidable transmission losses into account by modeling the link as a completely-positive trace-decreasing map. We also, crucially, remove the assumption of independent and identically distributed samples, which is known to be incompatible with adversarial settings. Finally, in view of the use of the certified transmitted states for follow-up applications, our protocol moves beyond certification of the channel to allow us to estimate the quality of the transmitted quantum message itself. To illustrate the practical relevance and the feasibility of our protocol with currently available technology we provide an experimental implementation based on a state-of-the-art polarization entangled photon pair source in a Sagnac configuration and analyze its robustness for realistic losses and errors.

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arXiv2021

Sample-efficient adaptive calibration of quantum networks using Bayesian optimization

Indistinguishable photons are imperative for advanced quantum communication networks. Indistinguishability is difficult to obtain because of environment-induced photon transformations and loss imparted by communication channels, especially in noisy scenarios. Strategies to mitigate these transformations often require hardware or software overhead that is restrictive (e.g. adding noise), infeasible (e.g. on a satellite), or time-consuming for deployed networks. Here we propose and develop resource-efficient Bayesian optimization techniques to rapidly and adaptively calibrate the indistinguishability of individual photons for quantum networks using only information derived from their measurement. To experimentally validate our approach, we demonstrate the optimization of Hong-Ou-Mandel interference between two photons -- a central task in quantum networking -- finding rapid, efficient, and reliable convergence towards maximal photon indistinguishability in the presence of high loss and shot noise. We expect our resource-optimized and experimentally friendly methodology will allow fast and reliable calibration of indistinguishable quanta, a necessary task in distributed quantum computing, communications, and sensing, as well as for fundamental investigations.

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arXiv2020

Improved Light-Matter Interaction for Storage of Quantum States of Light in a Thulium-Doped Crystal Cavity

We design and implement an atomic frequency comb quantum memory for 793 nm wavelength photons using a monolithic cavity based on a thulium-doped Y$_3$Al$_5$O$_{12}$ (Tm:YAG) crystal. Approximate impedance matching results in the absorption of approximately $90\%$ of input photons and a memory efficiency of (27.5$\pm$ 2.7)% over a 500 MHz bandwidth. The cavity enhancement leads to a significant improvement over the previous efficiency in Tm-doped crystals using a quantum memory protocol. In turn, this allows us for the first time to store and recall quantum states of light in such a memory. Our results demonstrate progress toward efficient and faithful storage of single photon qubits with large time-bandwidth product and multi-mode capacity for quantum networking.

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