Quantum secret sharing without entanglement

After analysing the main quantum secret sharing protocol based on the entanglement states, we propose an idea to directly encode the qubit of quantum key distributions, and then present a quantum secret sharing scheme where only product states are employed. As entanglement, especially the inaccessible multi-entangled state, is not necessary in the present quantum secret sharing protocol, it may be more applicable when the number of the parties of secret sharing is large. Its theoretic efficiency is also doubled to approach 100%. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.