Fault-tolerant high-capacity quantum key distribution over a collective-noise channel using extended unitary operations

We propose two fault-tolerant high-capacity quantum key distribution schemes, in which an entangled pair over a collective-noise channel consisting of one logical qubit and one physical qubit can carry four bits of key information. The basic idea is to use 2-extended unitary operations from collective noises together with quantum dense coding. The key messages are encoded on logical qubits of two physical qubits with sixteen 2-extended unitary operations based on collective noises. The key can be recovered using Bell-state analysis on the logical qubit and a single-photon measurement on the physical qubit rather than three-qubit GHZ joint measurements. The proposed protocols require a collation table to be shared between Alice and Bob in advance. Consequently, the key messages carried by an entangled state, in our protocol, have doubled at the price of sharing the collation table between Alice and Bob. However, the efficiency of qubits is enhanced because a quantum bit is more expensive to prepare than a classical bit.