Gravitational effects on satellite quantum communication

During the seminar, I will present elementary considerations concerning the influence of the gravitational field on satellite quantum communication. I will first discuss the impact of Earth’s gravitational field on wave packets. It will be shown that the effect may contribute up to a few percent of the quantum bit error rate for certain orbits. Then I will elaborate on the fate of the polarisation states of light in curved spacetimes. Some relevant aspects of the spin/helicity-gravity coupling will be discussed in this context.