Eur. Phys. J. D (2015) 69: 258
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2015-60341-y

Regular Article

Getting something out of nothing in the measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution

¹ Physics and Information Engineering Department, Luoyang Normal College, Luoyang 471022, Henan, P.R. China
² State Key Laboratory of Magnetic Resonances and Atomic and Molecular Physics, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430071, P.R. China

^a e-mail: huyaohua1@sina.com

Received: 8 June 2015
Received in final form: 4 September 2015
Published online: 19 November 2015

Abstract

Because of the monogamy of entanglement, the measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution is immune to the side-information leaking of the measurement devices. When the correlated measurement outcomes are generated from the dark counts, no entanglement is actually obtained. However, secure key bits can still be proven to be generated from these measurement outcomes. Especially, we will give numerical studies on the contributions of dark counts to the key generation rate in practical decoy state MDI-QKD where a signal source, a weaker decoy source and a vacuum decoy source are used by either legitimate key distributer.