Entanglement distribution through existing telecommunication infrastructure is crucial for realizing large-scale quantum networks. However, distance limitations imposed by photon losses and the no-cloning theorem present significant challenges. Quantum repeaters based on entangled telecom wavelength photons and quantum memories offer a promising solution to overcome these limitations. In this work, we report an important milestone in quantum repeater architecture by demonstrating entanglement between a telecom-wavelength (1324 nm) photon and a room-temperature quantum memory with a fidelity up to 90.2%, using simple rubidium systems for both photon generation and storage. Furthermore, we achieve high-rate photon-memory entanglement generation of up to 1,200 Bell pairs per second with 80% fidelity. The technical simplicity and robustness of our room-temperature systems paves the way towards deploying quantum networks at scale in realistic settings.
@article{arxiv.2503.11564,
title = {High-fidelity entanglement between a telecom photon and a room-temperature quantum memory},
author = {Yang Wang and Alexander N. Craddock and Jaeda M. Mendoza and Rourke Sekelsky and Mael Flament and Mehdi Namazi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.11564},
year = {2025}
}