Near-space flight of a correlated photon system

• DOI: 10.1038/srep06366
• Publication Date: 2014-09-15T09:02:50Z
• Authors: Zhongkan Tang; Rakhitha Chandras...; Yau Yong Sean; Cliff Cheng; Christoph Wildfeuer; Alexander Ling
• Keywords: Quantum Physics; Physics - Instrumentation and Detectors; 0103 physical sciences; FOS: Physical sciences; Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det); Quantum Physics (quant-ph); 7. Clean energy; 01 natural sciences; Article

We report the successful test flight of a device for generating and monitoring correlated photon pairs under near-space conditions up to 35.5km altitude. Data from ground based qualification tests and the high altitude experiment demonstrate that the device continues to operate even under harsh environmental conditions. The design of the rugged, compact and power-efficient photon pair system is presented. This design enables autonomous photon pair systems to be deployed on low-resource platforms such as nanosatellites hosting remote nodes of a quantum key distribution network. These results pave the way for tests of entangled photon technology in low earth orbit.