Experimental quantum repeater without quantum memory
Abstract
Quantum repeaters -- important components of a scalable quantum internet -- enable the entanglement to be distributed over long distances. The standard paradigm for a quantum repeater relies on a necessary demanding requirement of quantum memory. Despite significant progress, the limited performance of quantum memory makes practical quantum repeaters still a great challenge. Remarkably, a proposed all-photonic quantum repeater avoids the need for quantum memory by harnessing the graph states in the repeater nodes. Here we perform an experimental demonstration of an all-photonic quantum repeater using linear optics. By manipulating a 12-photon interferometer, we implement a 2-by-2 parallel all-photonic quantum repeater, and observe an 89% enhancement of entanglement-generation rate over the standard parallel entanglement swapping. These results open a new way towards designing repeaters with efficient single-photon sources and photonic graph states, and suggest that the all-photonic scheme represents an alternative path -- parallel to that of matter-memory-based schemes -- towards realizing practical quantum repeaters.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1908.05351,
title = {Experimental quantum repeater without quantum memory},
author = {Zheng-Da Li and Rui Zhang and Xu-Fei Yin and Li-Zheng Liu and Yi Hu and Yu-Qiang Fang and Yue-Yang Fei and Xiao Jiang and Jun Zhang and Li Li and Nai-Le Liu and Feihu Xu and Yu-Ao Chen and Jian-Wei Pan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.05351},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Published online in Nature Photonics