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arXiv:1204.2178 · Physical Review A

Measurement-based quantum repeaters

Michael J. Zwerger, Wolfgang Dür, Hans J. Briegel

Published Jun 27, 2012• 113 citations
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Abstract

We introduce measurement-based quantum repeaters, where small-scale measurement-based quantum processors are used to perform entanglement purification and entanglement swapping in a long-range quantum communication protocol. In the scheme, preprepared entangled states stored at intermediate repeater stations are coupled with incoming photons by simple Bell measurements, without the need of performing additional quantum gates. We show how to construct the required resource states, and how to minimize their size. We analyze the performance of the scheme under noise and imperfections, with focus on small-scale implementations involving entangled states of few qubits. We find measurement-based purification protocols with significantly improved noise thresholds. Furthermore we show that resource states of small size suffice to significantly increase the maximal communication distance. We also discuss possible advantages of our scheme for different setups.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.85.062326

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We introduce measurement-based quantum repeaters, where small-scale measurement-based quantum processors are used to perform entanglement purification and entanglement swapping in a long-range quantum communication protocol. In the scheme, preprepared entangled states stored at intermediate repeater stations are coupled with incoming photons by simple Bell measurements, without the need of performing additional quantum gates. We show how to construct the required resource states, and how to minimize their size. We analyze the performance of the scheme under noise and imperfections, with focus on small-scale implementations involving entangled states of few qubits. We find measurement-based purification protocols with significantly improved noise thresholds. Furthermore we show that resource states of small size suffice to significantly increase the maximal communication distance. We also discuss possible advantages of our scheme for different setups.
Measurement-based quantum repeaters employ entanglement distillation and swapping across links using locally prepared resource states of minimal size and local Bell measurements. In this Letter, we introduce a systematic protocol for measurement-based entanglement distillation and its application to repeaters that can leverage any stabilizer code. Given a code, we explicitly define the corresponding resource state and derive an error-recovery operation based on all Bell measurement outcomes. Our approach offers deeper insights into the impact of resource state noise on repeater performance while also providing strategies for efficient preparation and fault-tolerant preservation of resource states. As an application, we propose a measurement-based repeater protocol based on quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes, enabling constant-yield Bell state distribution over arbitrary distances. Numerical simulations identify a fault-tolerant threshold on the total physical error per repeater segment-including errors on resource states, remotely generated Bell states, and Bell measurements-and confirm that increasing the QLDPC code size further suppresses the logical error while maintaining a fixed encoding rate. This Letter establishes a scalable backbone for future global-scale fault-tolerant quantum networks.
We study the use of entanglement purification for quantum communication over long distances. For distances much longer than the coherence length of a corresponding noisy quantum channel, the fidelity of transmission is usually so low that standard purification methods are not applicable. It is possible, however, to divide the channel into shorter segments that are purified separately and then connected by the method of entanglement swapping. This method can be much more efficient than schemes based on quantum error correction, as it makes explicit use of two-way classical communication. An important question is how the noise, introduced by imperfect local operations (that constitute the protocols of purification and the entanglement swapping), accumulates in such a compound channel, and how it can be kept below a certain noise level. To treat this problem, we first study the applicability and the efficiency of entanglement purification protocols in the situation of imperfect local operations. We then present a scheme that allows entanglement purification over arbitrary long channels and tolerates errors on the percent level. It requires a polynomial overhead in time, and an overhead in local resources that grows only logarithmically with the length of the channel.
We describe a quantum repeater protocol for long-distance quantum communication. In this scheme, entanglement is created between qubits at intermediate stations of the channel by using a weak dispersive light-matter interaction and distributing the outgoing bright coherent-light pulses among the stations. Noisy entangled pairs of electronic spin are then prepared with high success probability via homodyne detection and postselection. The local gates for entanglement purification and swapping are deterministic and measurement-free, based upon the same coherent-light resources and weak interactions as for the initial entanglement distribution. Finally, the entanglement is stored in a nuclear-spin-based quantum memory. With our system, qubit-communication rates approaching 100 Hz over 1280 km with fidelities near 99% are possible for reasonable local gate errors.
Entanglement purification is the distilling of high-quality entanglement from low-quality entanglement and is a key element in the quantum repeater. As a new branch of entanglement purification, the measurement-based entanglement purification protocol (MBEPP) only requires one to perform the Bell state measurement to couple resource states with noisy pairs, and it tolerates more local noise than the conventional purification protocols. Existing MBEPPs usually focus on physical qubit entanglement. In this paper, we propose a measurement-based logical qubit entanglement purification protocol (MBLEPP) with quantum nondemolition detection (QND), where the qubit is encoded in the quantum parity code. The results show that this MBLEPP can also work with photon loss under the conditions that each block of the logical Bell state measurement contains at least one physical qubit, that at least one of the blocks is intact, and that the entanglement exists between all blocks. Moreover, we also consider the MBLEPP with imperfect QND. We show that below a certain QND error threshold, this MBLEPP can still work. In this way, this MBLEPP not only obtains high-fidelity entanglement but also tolerates photon loss and the error from imperfect QND. This MBLEPP combines the benefits of the MBEPP and quantum error correction code and may have potential application in long-distance quantum communication.
Quantum repeaters pave the way for long-distance quantum communications and quantum Internet, and the idea of quantum repeaters is based on entanglement swapping which requires the implementation of controlled quantum gates. Frequently measuring a quantum system affects its dynamics which is known as the quantum Zeno effect (QZE). Beyond slowing down its evolution, QZE can be used to control the dynamics of a quantum system by introducing a carefully designed set of operations between measurements. Here, we propose an entanglement swapping protocol based on QZE, which achieves almost unit fidelity. Implementation of our protocol requires only simple frequent threshold measurements and single particle rotations. We extend the proposed entanglement swapping protocol to a series of repeater stations for constructing quantum Zeno repeaters which also achieve almost unit fidelity regardless of the number of repeaters. Requiring no controlled gates, our proposal reduces the quantum circuit complexity of quantum repeaters. Our work has potential to contribute to long distance quantum communications and quantum computing via quantum Zeno effect.
We analyze a method that uses fixed, minimal physical resources to achieve generation and nested purification of quantum entanglement for quantum communication over arbitrarily long distances and discuss its implementation using realistic photon emitters and photonic channels. In this method, we use single-photon emitters with two internal degrees of freedom formed by an electron spin and a nuclear spin to build intermediate nodes in a quantum channel. State-selective fluorescence is used for probablistic entanglement generation between electron spins in adjacent nodes. We analyze in detail several approaches which are applicable to realistic, homogeneously broadened single-photon emitters. Furthermore, the coupled electron and nuclear spins can be used to efficiently implement entanglement swapping and purification. We show that these techniques can be combined to generate high-fidelity entanglement over arbitrarily long distances. We present a specific protocol that functions in polynomial time and tolerates percent-level errors in entanglement fidelity and local operations. The scheme has the lowest requirements on physical resources of any current scheme for fully fault-tolerant quantum repeaters.