English

A metropolitan-scale trapped-ion quantum network node with hybrid multiplexing enhancements

Quantum Physics 2025-03-19 v1

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 55-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 4444 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 96.8%96.8\%/94.6%94.6\%/89.8%89.8\% with a success rate of 263s1263\,\text{s}^{-1}/40s140\,\text{s}^{-1}/4.28s14.28\,\text{s}^{-1}, over a fiber of 33\,m/11\,km/1212\,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 366366\,ms is achieved. This coherence time has exceeded the expected entanglement generation time 234234\,ms over a 1212\,km fiber, which is realized for the first time in a metropolitan-scale quantum network node.

Keywords

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

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:24:43.659Z