Conventional wisdom suggests that realistic quantum repeaters will require quasi-deterministic sources of entangled photon pairs. In contrast, we here study a quantum repeater architecture that uses simple parametric down-conversion sources, as well as frequency-multiplexed multimode quantum memories and photon-number resolving detectors. We show that this approach can significantly extend quantum communication distances compared to direct transmission. This shows that important trade-offs are possible between the different components of quantum repeater architectures.
@article{arxiv.1505.03470,
title = {Practical Quantum Repeaters with Parametric Down-Conversion Sources},
author = {Hari Krovi and Saikat Guha and Zachary Dutton and Joshua A. Slater and Christoph Simon and Wolfgang Tittel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.03470},
year = {2016}
}