Experimental Quantum Fingerprinting without the Shared Randomness Loophole

Quantum fingerprinting (QF) promises exponential reduction of information transmission in executing communication complexity tasks. Practicality and quantum advantage of this novel protocol has been recently demonstrated using weak coherent pulses to carry the fingerprinting information. However, all coherent QF implementations rely upon a direct optical link to maintain coherence between the users, which does not comply with the protocol's rule that the users must not have any access to a shared randomness. To close this loophole, we propose, and experimentally demonstrate, a novel protocol based on asynchronous coincidence pairing from the interference result between coherent optical fields that are remotely and independently prepared. Over a length of 20 km telecom fiber, our QF setup has outperformed the best-known classical algorithm, for the first time without being susceptible to shared randomness. Our result paves the way toward practical applications of QF in communication complexity.