High performance optical free-space links for quantum communications
Matthias Goy, René Berlich, Andrej Kržič, Daniel Rieländer, Teresa Kopf, Sakshi Sharma, Fabian Steinlechner · International Conference on Space Optics — ICSO 2020 · 2021
Secure communication networks are the critical infrastructure of the information age. To ensure secure communication between governmental institutions and other high-security environments, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) initiated an ambitious project { the QuNET initiative. In a joint effort, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL), the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Fraunhofer Society aim to develop the technological basis of a German quantum key distribution (QKD) infrastructure. This paper describes the infrastructure used in a first link demonstrator within this project and how we achieved the transition from initial quantum transceiver concepts to first link experiments.