We introduce a protocol to distribute entanglement between remote parties. Our protocol is based on a chain of repeater stations, and exploits topological encoding to tolerate very high levels of defects and errors. The repeater stations may employ probabilistic entanglement operations which usually fail; ours is the first protocol to explicitly allow for technologies of this kind. Given an error rate between stations in excess of 10%, arbitrarily long range high fidelity entanglement distribution is possible even if the heralded failure rate within the stations is as high as 99%, providing that unheralded errors are low (order 0.01%).
Cite
@article{arxiv.1209.4031,
title = {Long range failure-tolerant entanglement distribution},
author = {Ying Li and Sean D. Barrett and Thomas M. Stace and Simon C. Benjamin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.4031},
year = {2015}
}