Passive Pauli Toggling of Polarization Qubits in Optical Fibers: Error Bounds and QKD Performance

Quantum Physics arXiv:2609.21373 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 18 Sep 2026] Title:Passive Pauli Toggling of Polarization Qubits in Optical Fibers: Error Bounds and QKD Performance Authors:Bongjune Kim, Jeongho Bang View a PDF of the paper titled Passive Pauli Toggling of Polarization Qubits in Optical Fibers: Error Bounds and QKD Performance, by Bongjune Kim and Jeongho Bang View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Polarization qubits offer a direct route to fiber-based quantum communication, yet the fiber that carries them also scrambles their reference frame through uncontrolled birefringence. Active compensation commonly relies on monitoring and feedback, raising a natural question: can the link itself suppress coherent polarization drift before it reaches the receiver? We show that it can within a regime of sufficiently correlated unitary drift. Our central idea is to embed a fixed cyclic sequence of Pauli rotations along the fiber, turning propagation distance into a spatial toggling frame. Rather than estimating and inverting the unknown transformation, the sequence repeatedly reverses its leading action. We establish exact refocusing for constant generators compatible with a two-segment echo, show that a four-frame Pauli cell cancels the leading contribution of any traceless quasi-static generator, and bound the residual error for smoothly varying birefringence. We then connect these guarantees to operational BB84 quantities, including measured QBERs, the resulting secret fraction, and insertion loss. In simulations of a 50 km fiber with spatially correlated birefringence, a representative design reduces the mean QBER from 6.11% to 0.224% at a device spacing of 1.25 km. With an assumed per-device transmission of t = 0.997, this raises the asymptotic key rate per launched pulse by a factor of approximately 2.5. For this parameter set, the best design in the tested scan is not the densest one: error suppression and optical loss create a finite operating window. These results provide a loss-aware design principle for passive polarization stabilization and suggest a low-overhead complement to active tracking in polarization-encoded QKD networks. Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2609.21373 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2609.21373v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.21373 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Bongjune Kim [view email] [v1] Fri, 18 Sep 2026 06:38:11 UTC (2,827 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Passive Pauli Toggling of Polarization Qubits in Optical Fibers: Error Bounds and QKD Performance, by Bongjune Kim and Jeongho BangView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-09 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)