The current race in quantum communication – endeavouring to establish a global quantum network – must account for special and general relativistic effects. The well-studied general relativistic effects include Shapiro time-delay, gravitational lensing, and frame dragging which all are due to how a mass distribution alters geodesics. Here, we report how the curvature of spacetime geometry affects the propagation of information carriers along an arbitrary geodesic. An explicit expression for the distortion onto the carrier wavefunction in terms of the Riemann curvature is obtained. Furthermore, we investigate this distortion for anti de Sitter and Schwarzschild geometries. For instance, the spacetime curvature causes a 0.10 radian phase-shift for communication between Earth and the International Space Station on a monochromatic laser beam and quadrupole astigmatism; can cause a 12.2% cross-talk between structured modes traversing through the solar system. Our finding shows that this gravitational distortion is significant, and it needs to be either pre- or post-corrected at the sender or receiver to retrieve the information.

当前的量子通信竞赛——努力建立一个全球量子网络——必须考虑特殊和一般的相对论效应。经过充分研究的一般相对论效应包括夏皮罗时间延迟、引力透镜和帧拖拽，这些都是由于质量分布如何改变测地线造成的。在这里，我们报告时空几何的曲率如何影响信息载体沿任意测地线的传播。根据黎曼曲率获得了载波函数失真的明确表达式。此外，我们研究了反德西特几何和施瓦西几何的这种失真。例如，时空曲率导致 0。10 弧度相移，用于地球与国际空间站之间基于单色激光束和四极散光的通信；会导致穿过太阳系的结构模式之间产生 12.2% 的串扰。我们的发现表明，这种引力失真很重要，需要在发送方或接收方进行预校正或后校正以检索信息。