Experimental quantum secure direct communication with single photons

Quantum secure direct communication is an important mode of quantum communication in which secret messages are securely communicated directly over a quantum channel. Quantum secure direct communication is also a basic cryptographic primitive for constructing other quantum communication tasks, such as quantum authentication and quantum dialog. Here, we report the first experimental demonstration of quantum secure direct communication based on the DL04 protocol and equipped with single-photon frequency coding that explicitly demonstrated block transmission. In our experiment, we provided 16 different frequency channels, equivalent to a nibble of four-bit binary numbers for direct information transmission. The experiment firmly demonstrated the feasibility of quantum secure direct communication in the presence of noise and loss.