A practically feasible entanglement assisted quantum key distribution protocol

Abstract

We give an entanglement assisted scheme for quantum key distribution. The scheme requires the maximally entangled 2-qubit state but does not require any quantum storage. The scheme is unconditionally secure under whatever Eve's attack. Given the symmetric noisy channel with uncorrelated noise, our scheme can tolerate the bit error rate up to 26% in the 4-state case and 30% in the 6-state respectively, respectively. These values are higher than those of all currently known two-level-state schemes without using a quantum storage.