Entanglement-Based Quantum Communication
A. Beveratos, Sébastien Tanzilli · SPIE eBooks · 2010
The aim of this chapter is not to focus one more time on quantum cryptography, which is extensively discussed in a collection of books and review papers, but rather to provide the reader with recent advances and challenges that concern experimental, entanglement-based, guided-wave quantum communication. In our everyday world, almost all the information exchanged, stored, and processed is encoded using elementary entities called bits, conventionally represented by the discrete values 0 or 1. In today's fiber-based telecommunications systems, these classical bits are carried by light pulses, corresponding to macroscopic packets of photons, allowing a classical description of their behavior and propagation. To draw a simple picture, each light pulse consists of at least hundreds, of photons to encode the bit value 1, or of no photons to encode the bit value 0.