Dynamical quantum repeater using cavity-QED and optical coherent states

In the framework of cavity QED, we propose a quantum repeater scheme that uses coherent light and atoms coupled to optical cavities. In contrast to conventional schemes, we exploit solely the cavity QED evolution for the entire quantum repeater scheme and, thus, avoid any explicit execution of quantum logical gates. The entanglement distribution between the repeater nodes is realized with the help of pulses of coherent light interacting with the atom-cavity system in each repeater node. In our previous paper [D. Gonta and P. van Loock, Phys. Rev. A 86, 052312 (2012)], we already proposed a dynamical protocol to purify a bipartite entangled state using the evolution of atomic chains coupled to optical cavities. Here, we incorporate parts of this protocol in our repeater scheme, combining it with dynamical versions of entanglement distribution and swapping.