Two-step quantum dialogue protocols against collective noises

Abstract

By designing two-step transmissions, this paper presents two quantum dialogue (QD) protocols that can resist different types of collective noise in the quantum channel. The message carrier of the proposed scheme utilizes decoherence-free subspaces to remain invariant under the impact of collective noise. We employ combinations of these quantum states to form decoy photon pairs, ensuring secure transmission and preventing message distortion. Based on the principle that a single photon in an EPR pair reveals no information about its actual state, an EPR pair requires only one photon for protection during transmission. This property effectively reduces the number of decoy photons needed to ensure the security of quantum transmission, which can also be applied to the logical EPR pair consisting of logical qubits. A quantum logic circuit is also designed to demonstrate the practical implementation of shuffling the logical qubits within each logical EPR pair. Therefore, the proposed two-step QD protocols require only half as many decoy photons to achieve the same security level as other state-of-the-art QD schemes. The significant reduction in the utilization of decoy photons improves the qubit efficiency of the proposed QD protocols compared to other existing works in the field. Additionally, the security analysis of the proposed QD schemes ensures the absence of information leakage and resistance to common quantum attacks.