Which verification qubits perform best for secure communication in noisy channel?

In secure quantum communication protocols, a set of single qubits prepared using 2 or more mutually unbiased bases or a set of $n$-qubit ($n\geq2$) entangled states of a particular form are usually used to form a verification string which is subsequently used to detect traces of eavesdropping. The qubits that form a verification string are referred to as decoy qubits, and there exists a large set of different quantum states that can be used as decoy qubits. In the absence of noise, any choice of decoy qubits provides equivalent security. In this paper, we examine such equivalence for noisy environment (e.g., in amplitude damping, phase damping, collective dephasing and collective rotation noise channels) by comparing the decoy-qubit assisted schemes of secure quantum communication that use single qubit states as decoy qubits with the schemes that use entangled states as decoy qubits. Our study reveals that the single qubit assisted scheme perform better in some noisy environments, while some entangled qubits assisted schemes perform better in other noisy environments. Specifically, single qubits assisted schemes perform better in amplitude damping and phase damping noisy channels, whereas a few Bell-state-based decoy schemes are found to perform better in the presence of the collective noise. Thus, if the kind of noise present in a communication channel (i.e., the characteristics of the channel) is known or measured, then the present study can provide the best choice of decoy qubits required for implementation of schemes of secure quantum communication through that channel.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

Asymmetric Quantum Dialogue in Noisy Environment

A notion of asymmetric quantum dialogue (AQD) is introduced. Conventional protocols of quantum dialogue are essentially symmetric as both the users (Alice and Bob) can encode the same amount of classical information. In contrast, the scheme for AQD introduced here provides different amount of communication powers to Alice and Bob. The proposed scheme, offers an architecture, where the entangled state and the encoding scheme to be shared between Alice and Bob depends on the amount of classical information they want to exchange with each other. The general structure for the AQD scheme has been obtained using a group theoretic structure of the operators introduced in (Shukla et al., Phys. Lett. A, 377 (2013) 518). The effect of different types of noises (e.g., amplitude damping and phase damping noise) on the proposed scheme is investigated, and it is shown that the proposed AQD is robust and uses optimized amount of quantum resources.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

Quantum Conference

A notion of quantum conference is introduced in analogy with the usual notion of a conference that happens frequently in today's world. Quantum conference is defined as a multiparty secure communication task that allows each party to communicate their messages simultaneously to all other parties in a secure manner using quantum resources. Two efficient and secure protocols for quantum conference have been proposed. The security and efficiency of the proposed protocols have been analyzed critically. It is shown that the proposed protocols can be realized using a large number of entangled states and group of operators. Further, it is shown that the proposed schemes can be easily reduced to protocol for multiparty quantum key distribution and some earlier proposed schemes of quantum conference, where the notion of quantum conference was different.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Quantum e-commerce: A comparative study of possible protocols for online shopping and other tasks related to e-commerce

A set of quantum protocols for online shopping is proposed and analyzed to establish that it is possible to perform secure online shopping using different types of quantum resources. Specifically, a single photon based, a Bell state based and two 3-qubit entangled state based quantum online shopping schemes are proposed. The Bell state based scheme, being a completely orthogonal state based protocol, is fundamentally different from the earlier proposed schemes which were based on conjugate coding. One of the 3-qubit entangled state based scheme is build on the principle of entanglement swapping which enables us to accomplish the task without transmission of the message encoded qubits through the channel. Possible ways of generalizing the entangled state based schemes proposed here to the schemes which use multiqubit entangled states is also discussed. Further, all the proposed protocols are shown to be free from the limitations of the recently proposed protocol of Huang et al. (Quantum Inf. Process. 14, 2211-2225, 2015) which allows the buyer (Alice) to change her order at a later time (after initially placing the order and getting it authenticated by the controller). The proposed schemes are also compared with the existing schemes using qubit efficiency.Comment: It's shown that quantum e-commerce is not a difficult task, and it can be done in various way