A global estimation of the lower bound of the privacy amplification term for decoy-state quantum key distribution

Abstract

The privacy amplification term, of which the lower bound needs to be estimated with the decoy-state method, plays a positive role in the secure key rate formula for decoy-state quantum key distribution. In previous work, the yield and the bit error rate of single-photon state are estimated separately to gain this lower bound. In this work, we for the first time take the privacy amplification term as a whole to consider this lower bound. The mathematical description for the correlation between the yield and the bit error rate of single-photon state is given with just two unknown variables. Based on this, we obtain the global estimation of this lower bound for both BB84 protocol and measurement-device-independent protocol. The results of numerical simulation show that the global estimation can significantly improve the performance of quantum key distribution.