Impact of Turbulence in Long Range Quantum and Classical Communications
The purpose of the work was to investigate the propagation of single photon beams over the inter-island link, and in particular between a transmitter on the roof of the Jacob Kapteyn Telescope at ORM, La Palma, and the ESA-Optical Ground Station at Izana, Tenerife as receiver. Indeed, the study of the free-space propagation of quantum correlations is necessary for any future application of quantum communication aiming to connect two remote locations. The problem related to the free-space propagation is represented by the atmospheric turbulence that acts as a temporal and spatial variation of the air refraction index. A turbulent channel acts as an increment of the losses on the transmitted photons due to beam wandering of the beam centroid or to scintillation, increasing the role of the noise.