Sharing a quantum secret without a trusted party

In a conventional quantum (k, n) threshold scheme, a trusted party shares a secret quantum state with n participants such that any k of those participants can cooperate to recover the original secret, while fewer than k participants obtain no information about the secret. In this paper we show how to construct a quantum (k, n) threshold scheme without the assistance of a trusted party, who generates and distributes shares among the participants. Instead, each participant chooses his private state and contributes the same to the determination of the final secret quantum state. Copyright © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.