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A major problem with conventional QKD techniques is the raw key transmission rate which for acceptable level of security is generally low. One way to overcome this problem is to create either directly or indirectly a number of parallel QKD transmission channels thus achieving a rate multiplicity equal to the number of parallel channels. This paper explores how a number of parallel Discrete Memoryless Channels (DMCs) can be created from imaging twin beams from a Parametric Down Conversion (PDC) process and examines the performance of FEC coding for information reconciliation over the resulting parallel channels. Twin beams exhibit quantum correlations that has been effectively used as a tool for many applications including calibration of single photon detectors. By now, detection of multimode spatial correlations is a mature field and in principle, only depends on the transmission and detection efficiency of the devices and the channel. In,1–3 the authors utilized their know-how on almost perfect selection of modes of pairwise correlated entangled beams and the optimization of the noise reduction to below the shot-noise level, for absolute calibration of Charge Coupled Device (CCD) cameras. The same basic principle is currently being considered by the same authors for possible use in Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). The main advantage in such an approach would be the ability to work with much higher photon fluxes than that of a single photon regime that is theoretically required for discrete variable QKD applications (in practice, very weak laser pulses with mean photon count below one are used), and the fact that the QKD data rate is increased significantly since multiple equivalent parallel channels result from quantization of symmetric regions into super-pixels. The natural setup of quantization of CCD detection area and subsequent measurement of the correlation statistic needed to detect the presence of the eavesdropper Eve, leads to a number of parallel QKD channel models each one of which is a Discrete Memoryless Channel (DMC) with a number of inputs and outputs that can be more than two (i.e., each parallel channel is a Multilevel DMC). This paper investigates the use of Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes for information reconciliation on the effective parallel channels associated with the multi-level DMCs. The performance of such codes are shown to be close to the theoretical limits.
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