Sending-or-not-sending twin field quantum key distribution with imperfect vacuum sources

Abstract

Abstract The sending-or-not-sending (SNS) protocol of the twin-field (TF) quantum key distribution (QKD) can tolerant large misalignment error and its key rate can exceed the linear bound of repeaterless QKD. The original SNS protocol and all variants of TF-QKD require perfect vacuum sources, but in the real world experiments there is no practical perfect vacuum source. Instead, experimenters use extremely weak sources to substitute vacuum sources, which may break the security of the protocol. Here we propose an SNS protocol with imperfect vacuum sources and give the non-asymptotic decoy-state analysis of this protocol. Our numerical simulation shows that when the imperfect vacuum sources are close to perfect vacuum sources, our protocol can obtain similar key rate as that with perfect vacuum sources. This is the first result that closes the potential security loophole due to imperfect vacuum of TF-QKD.