FPGA-based emulation of a synchronous phase-coded quantum cryptography system

Abstract

We present FPGA-based emulation of a synchronous phase-coded quantum cryptography system. Several of the emulated subsystems are used for implementation in a free space demonstrative QPSK scheme for quantum key distribution with continuous variables (CV-QKD) using a base and optical phase synchronization. The CV-QKD systems are commonly implemented using QPSK modulation with switched or simultaneous detection. In this paper we only make use of one base of the QPSK system in order to get a simpler modulation (BPSK) scheme, used for demonstrative purposes. The reported results from the emulation and the experiment in terms of Quantum Bit Error Rate (QBER) and mutual information for different values of the number of photons per bit are in good agreement.