A metropolitan-scale trapped-ion quantum network node with hybrid multiplexing enhancements
Abstract
Quantum network and quantum repeater are promising ways to scale up a quantum information system to enable various applications with unprecedented performance. As a current bottleneck of building a long-distance quantum network, the distribution rate of heralded entanglement between remote network nodes is typically much lower than the decoherence rate of each local node, which obstructs the implementation of a metropolitan-scale quantum network with more than two remote nodes. A promising scheme to accelerate the remote entanglement distribution is through multiplexing enhancement based on a multimode quantum network node. In this work, we experimentally realize a functional -ion quantum network node with two different types of qubits inside. We employ a hybrid multiplexing scheme combining the methods of multiple excitation and ion shuttling, in which maximally time-bin modes are generated and sent through a long fiber to boost the entangling rate. Via this scheme, we can generate heralded ion-photon entanglement with a high fidelity of // with a success rate of //, over a fiber of m/km/km, respectively. In addition, the memory qubit can protect the stored quantum information from the destructive ion-photon entangling attempts via dual-type encoding and a memory coherence time of ms is achieved. This coherence time has exceeded the expected entanglement generation time ms over a km fiber, which is realized for the first time in a metropolitan-scale quantum network node.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.13898,
title = {A metropolitan-scale trapped-ion quantum network node with hybrid multiplexing enhancements},
author = {Z. -B. Cui and Z. -Q. Wang and P. -C. Lai and Y. Wang and J. -X. Shi and P. -Y. Liu and Y. -D. Sun and Z. -C. Tian and Y. -B. Liang and B. -X. Qi and Y. -Y. Huang and Z. -C. Zhou and Y. -K. Wu and Y. Xu and L. -M. Duan and Y. -F. Pu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.13898},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
15 pages, 13 figures