公开(公告)号：US20220140900A1

公开(公告)日：2022-05-05

申请号：US17459696

申请日：2021-08-27

Applicant: AIRBUS SAS

Inventor： Crisanto QUINTANA SANCHEZ ,  Gavin ERRY ,  Yoann THEUX

IPC: H04B10/11 ,  H04B10/70 ,  H04B10/532

Abstract: A free space optical communications transmitter terminal including an optical source arranged to provide a first beam of light encoding information to be communicated; an optical source arranged to provide photons encoding bits of a key of a Quantum Key Distribution protocol; and an optics arrangement. The first beam and the photons are linearly polarised. The optics arrangement is configured to combine the first beam and the photons into a single, second, beam to be transmitted to a receiver terminal; and transform the linear polarisation of the first beam into one of left and right circular polarisation and transform the linear polarisation of the photons into the other of left and right circular polarisation. A receiver terminal receives the second beam, transforms the circular polarisations into orthogonal linear polarisations, and filters out the linear polarisation of the first beam to allow the photons to pass to a single photon detector.