Nonorthogonal coding in spectrally-entangled photons

Controlling and engineering continuous spectral modes of entangled photons represents one of the promising approaches toward secure quantum communications. By using the telecom bandwidth generated from a cascade-emitted biphoton in atomic ensembles, a fiber-based long-distance quantum communication can be feasible owing to its low transmission loss. With multiplexed photon pairs, we propose to implement a nonorthogonal coding scheme in their spectral modes and present an architecture of multiple channels enabling a high-capacity transfer of codewords. Using the measures of the second-order correlations and associated visibility and contrast, we further quantify the performance of the proposed nonorthogonal coding scheme. Our results demonstrate the capability to encode and decode quantum information beyond the orthogonal coding scheme, and in particular, the multi-channel setup manifests a resilience and an advantage in a design with multiple channel errors. The proposed scheme here can be applicable to a large-scale and multiuser quantum communication and pave the way toward an efficient and functional quantum information processing.