Our security proof gives some improvement in rates and robustness to noise.

Intuition: single-photon based hybrid protocols are suitable for metropolitan-scale communications.

3) Our rate optimiser is closely aligned to experimental implementation.

We analytically derive the asymptotic rate for different quantum channels to give insights into current implementation readiness.

The hybrid protocol assimilates the best features of DV and CV protocols.

Encoding is in DV and decoding through heterodyne detection, similar to the proposal by Bing Qi: PRA 103, 012606 (2021).

Our work has a number of advantages ...