Vacuum-Signal Detection and the Principle-Level Feasibility of Arbitrarily Long-Distance Repeaterless Quantum Communication

Abstract

Practical repeaterless quantum communication (PRQC) is constrained by the divergence of quantum bit error rate (QBER) arising from the interplay between channel loss and single-photon detector (SPD) dark counts. As the channel transmission rate decays with distance, vacuum-signal-induced dark counts inevitably dominate detection events beyond a finite range, driving QBER toward 50\% and rendering PRQC infeasible. Here, a theoretical framework termed vacuum-signal detection (VSD) is established to address this limitation at the level of principle. By employing controlled operations together with multi-copy analysis, the VSD paradigm enables vacuum-induced detection events to be identified and filtered without disturbing the encoded messages. Consequently, the non-vacuum signal ratio (NVSR) of the accepted signals can be stabilized at a high value irrespective of channel attenuation, thereby suppressing the fundamental QBER of PRQC within the secure bounds at any communication distance. As a result, PRQC can, in principle, remain feasible over arbitrarily long distances. By providing a rigorous theoretical resolution of the fundamental QBER-induced distance limitation, this work clarifies the principle-level scalability of PRQC. Furthermore, the vacuum-filtering framework developed here and its introduction of multi-copy analysis may also be of interest in a broader class of loss-sensitive or detection-based quantum tasks.