Towards realizing the future quantum internet, a pivotal milestone entails the transition from two-node proof-of-principle experiments conducted in laboratories to comprehensive, multi-node setups on large scales. Here, we report on the debut implementation of a multi-node entanglement-based quantum network over a metropolitan area. We equipped three quantum nodes with atomic quantum memories and their telecom interfaces, and combined them into a scalable phase-stabilized architecture through a server node. We demonstrated heralded entanglement generation between two quantum nodes situated 12.5 km apart, and the storage of entanglement exceeding the round-trip communication time. We also showed the concurrent entanglement generation on three links. Our work provides a metropolitan-scale testbed for the evaluation and exploration of multi-node quantum network protocols and starts a new stage of quantum internet research.
@article{arxiv.2309.00221,
title = {A multinode quantum network over a metropolitan area},
author = {Jian-Long Liu and Xi-Yu Luo and Yong Yu and Chao-Yang Wang and Bin Wang and Yi Hu and Jun Li and Ming-Yang Zheng and Bo Yao and Zi Yan and Da Teng and Jin-Wei Jiang and Xiao-Bing Liu and Xiu-Ping Xie and Jun Zhang and Qing-He Mao and Xiao Jiang and Qiang Zhang and Xiao-Hui Bao and Jian-Wei Pan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.00221},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
21 pages in total, 4 figures and 1 table in the main text, 5 figures and 8 tables in the supplementary material