Fibre optics and optical communications articles from across Nature Portfolio

Realizing quantum conference key agreement is challenging in experiment and unpractical in application because of limited transmission distance caused by channel loss. The authors present here a quantum conference key agreement protocol with spatial multiplexing nature and adaptive operation, which can break limitations on quantum communication over network and thus shed some light on future global quantum network.

To bridge the ultrafast and slow classes of quantum-information-processing systems, a Fresnel time lens is developed by using a wideband electro-optic phase modulator combined with a dispersion element. The single-photon spectral bandwidth is compressed from picosecond to nanosecond timescales.

An unsupervised learning-based optical fiber imaging system is demonstrated to enable highly robust and nearly artifact-free transport of biological images through a meter-long disordered optical fiber.

Communications systems delivering signals at millimetre-wave/sub-THz frequencies suffer capacity fading over both long distances fibre transmission and also over short distance wireless transfer. Hai-Han Lu and colleagues report a combined wired/wireless system with sufficiently low bit error rates and error vector magnitudes as to satisfy the needs of future 5 G communications technologies.