Effects of ocean turbulence on photon orbital angular momentum quantum communication

Abstract

The effect of the turbulent motion of ocean on the quantum communication based on the orbital angular momentum in an underwater quantum channel is studied in this work. Based on the power spectrum model of ocean turbulence proposed by Elamassie, the quantitative relationships of different ocean turbulence parameters with the single photon detection probability of orbital angular momentum photons, the channel capacity, the key generation rate, the concurrence of two entangled photons are proposed. The maximum entanglement distance of the orbital angular momentum entangled photon-pairs in the ocean turbulence is further studied by the universal entanglement decay of the concurrence of entangled photon-pairs in the ocean turbulence. The results show that the detection probability of single photon, the channel capacity, the key generation rate, and the concurrence of entangled photon-pairs decrease with the increase of the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy and the decrease of the rate of dissipation of mean-squared temperature. The influence of the temperature and salinity balance parameter of ocean turbulence on the performance of underwater quantum communication are significantly different under the condition of whether the stable stratification of seawater is assumed or not. In the ocean turbulent environment, the increasing of the initial orbital angular momentum quantum number of signal photons can improve the key generation rate of quantum key distribution and the resistance of entangled photons to entanglement decay.