Distributed Temperature Sensor Interrogator Based on Polarization-Sensitive Reflectometry

In this paper, a polarization-sensitive reflectometry technique has been investigated in order to serve as an interrogating device in distributed sensing applications. As the sensing fiber has a beat length of about a few centimeters, a high-resolution reflectometer was required. A coherent optical frequency-domain reflectometer (OFDR) was used from this perspective. The principle is based on the linear dependence of fiber beat length on temperature. The reported experimental results detail the calibration method and discuss the features of the interrogating device in terms of temperature threshold and spatial resolution. The proposed system, exploiting the Rayleigh backscatter signal, offers an interesting alternative to existing systems, mainly based on nonlinear effects

Long-term performance of the SwissQuantum quantum key distribution network in a field environment

In this paper, we report on the performance of the SwissQuantum quantum key distribution (QKD) network. The network was installed in the Geneva metropolitan area and ran for more than one-and-a-half years, from the end of March 2009 to the beginning of January 2011. The main goal of this experiment was to test the reliability of the quantum layer over a long period of time in a production environment. A key management layer has been developed to manage the key between the three nodes of the network. This QKD-secure network was utilized by end-users through an application layer