Efficient implementation of the decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution with heralded single-photon sources

Abstract

We study decoy-state measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution using heralded single-photon sources. This has the advantage that the observed error rate in the $X$ basis is at higher order and not so large. We calculate the key rate and transmission distance for two cases: one using only triggered events, and the other using both triggered and nontriggered events. We compare the key rates of various protocols and find that our scheme using triggered and nontriggered events can give a higher key rate and a longer secure distance. Moreover, we also show the different behavior of our scheme when using different heralded single-photon sources, i.e., in Poisson or thermal distributions. We demonstrate that the former can generate a higher secure key rate than the latter and can thus work more efficiently in practical quantum key distributions.