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arXiv:2509.16689

On the accuracy of twirled approximations in repeater chains

Bethany Davies, Guus Avis, Stephanie Wehner

Published Sep 20, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

In the performance analysis of quantum networks, it is common to approximate bipartite entangled states as either being Bell-diagonal or Werner states. We refer to these as twirled approximations because it is possible to bring any state to such a form with a twirling map. Although twirled approximations can simplify calculations, they can lead to an inaccuracy in performance estimates. The goal of this work is to quantify this inaccuracy. We consider repeater chains where end-to-end entanglement is achieved by performing an entanglement swap at each repeater in the chain. We consider two scenarios: postselected and non-postselected entanglement swapping, where postselection is performed based on the Bell-state measurement outcomes at the repeaters. We show that, for non-postselected swapping, the Bell-diagonal approximation is exact for the computation of the Bell-diagonal elements of the end-to-end state. We also find that the Werner approximation accurately approximates the end-to-end fidelity when the infidelity of each initial state is small with respect to the number of repeaters in the chain. For postselected swapping, we find bounds on the difference in end-to-end fidelity from what is obtained with the twirled approximation, for initial states with a general noisy form. Finally, for the example of performing quantum key distribution over a repeater chain, we demonstrate how our insights can be used to understand how twirled approximations affect the secret-key rate.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2509.16689

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In the performance analysis of quantum networks, it is common to approximate bipartite entangled states as either being Bell-diagonal or Werner states. We refer to these as twirled approximations because it is possible to bring any state to such a form with a twirling map. Although twirled approximations can simplify calculations, they can lead to an inaccuracy in performance estimates. The goal of this work is to quantify this inaccuracy. We consider repeater chains where end-to-end entanglement is achieved by performing an entanglement swap at each repeater in the chain. We consider two scenarios: postselected and non-postselected entanglement swapping, where postselection is performed based on the Bell-state measurement outcomes at the repeaters. We show that, for non-postselected swapping, the Bell-diagonal approximation is exact for the computation of the Bell-diagonal elements of the end-to-end state. We also find that the Werner approximation accurately approximates the end-to-end fidelity when the infidelity of each initial state is small with respect to the number of repeaters in the chain. For postselected swapping, we find bounds on the difference in end-to-end fidelity from what is obtained with the twirled approximation, for initial states with a general noisy form. Finally, for the example of performing quantum key distribution over a repeater chain, we demonstrate how our insights can be used to understand how twirled approximations affect the secret-key rate.
We evaluate the performance of two-way quantum repeater chains with sequential entanglement swapping. Within the analysis we consider memory decoherence, gate imperfections, and imperfect link-level entanglement generation. Our main results include closed-form expressions for the average entanglement fidelity of the generated end-to-end entangled states. We generalize previous findings for the one-shot fidelity analysis and study the case where repeater chains serve end-to-end requests continuously. We provide solutions to the continuous request scenario by combining results from quantum information theory and queuing theory. Finally, we apply the formulas obtained to analyze the impacts of hardware parameters, i.e., coherence times and gate fidelity, and distance on the entanglement fidelity and secret key rate of homogeneous quantum repeater chains.
Efficient classical simulation of large-scale quantum networks frequently relies on noise approximations, which consider a restricted set of operators to describe noisy channels and operations. In this work, we demonstrate how such simplified error models, such as Pauli twirling or reset channels, can lead to severe quantitative and qualitative discrepancies in protocol performance predictions. We analyze, in particular, how small differences can accumulate in iterative and sequential protocols such as entanglement purification, entanglement swapping, and repeater chains. Our results reveal that neglected error contributions can lead to important performance under- and over-estimations, measurement-outcome dependency, and oscillations in the fidelity, which are entirely overlooked by the simplified error model approximations. These results show that rigorous validation of complete noise architectures is indispensable for accurately predicting operational thresholds in future quantum technologies.
Losses are one of the main bottlenecks for the distribution of entanglement in quantum networks, which can be overcome by the implementation of quantum repeaters. The most basic form of a quantum repeater chain is the swap ASAP repeater chain. In such a repeater chain, elementary links are probabilistically generated and deterministically swapped as soon as two adjacent links have been generated. As each entangled state is waiting to be swapped, decoherence is experienced, turning the fidelity of the entangled state between the end nodes of the chain into a random variable. Fully characterizing the (average) fidelity as the repeater chain grows is still an open problem. Here, we analytically investigate the case of equally-spaced repeaters, where we find exact analytic formulae for all moments of the fidelity up to 25 segments. We obtain these formulae by providing a general solution in terms of a generating function ; a function whose n'th term in its Maclaurin series yields the moments of the fidelity for n segments. We generalize this approach as well to a global cut-off policy – a method for increasing fidelity at the cost of longer entanglement delivery times – allowing for fast optimization of the cut-off parameter by eliminating the need for Monte Carlo simulation. We furthermore find simple approximations of the average fidelity that are exponentially tight, and, for up to 10 segments, the full distribution of the delivered fidelity. We use this to analytically calculate the secret-key rate, both with and without binning methods.
Bell-state measurement (BSM) on entangled states shared between quantum repeaters is the fundamental operation used to route entanglement in quantum networks. Performing BSMs on Werner states shared between repeaters leads to exponential decay in the fidelity of the end-to-end Werner state with the number of repeaters, necessitating entanglement distillation. In this work, we use quantum error correcting codes for deterministic entanglement distillation to route Werner states on a chain of repeaters. To maximize the end-to-end distillable entanglement, we utilize global link-state knowledge to determine the optimal policy for scheduling distillation and BSMs at the repeaters. We observe that low-rate codes produce high-fidelity end-to-end states owing to their excellent error-correcting capability, whereas high-rate codes yield a larger number of end-to-end states but of lower fidelity. The number of quantum memories used at repeaters increases with the code rate as well as the classical computation time of the decoder.
The most simplest form of quantum network is an one dimensional quantum network with a single player in each node. In remote entanglement distribution each of the players carry out measurement at the intermediate nodes to produce an entangled state between initial and final node which are remotely separated. It is imperative to say that the flow of information as well as the percolation of entanglement in a network between the source and target node is an important area of study. This will help us to understand the limits of the resource states as well as the measurements that are carried out in the process of remote entanglement distribution. In this article we investigate how the concurrence of the final entangled state obtained is connected with the concurrences of the initial entangled states present in a 1-D chain. We extend the works done for the pure entangled states for mixed entangled states like Werner states, Bell diagonal states and for general mixed states. We did not limit ourselves to a situation where the measurements are happening perfectly. We also investigate how these relations change when we consider imperfect swapping. We obtain the limits on the number of swappings as well as the success probability measurements to ensure the final state to be entangled state after swapping. In addition to these we also investigate on how much quantum information can be sent from the initial node to the final node (by computing the teleportation fidelity) when the measurement is perfect and imperfect with the same set of examples. Here also we obtain the limits on the number of swapping and the success probability of measurement to ensure that the final state obtained is capable of transferring the information . These results have tremendous future applications in sending quantum information between two quantum processors in remote entangled distribution.
In this work, we study the performance of simultaneous—also referred to as parallel—entanglement swapping strategies through the average entanglement of formation of the resulting Werner states shared between the end nodes. As an application of our analytical extension of the quantum network model, we analyze a simple four-node quantum repeater chain to compare both parallel and non-parallel strategies. Although parallel entanglement swapping strategies exhibit lower success probabilities, they outperform non-parallel ones when decoherence and entanglement measures are taken into account. These results indicate that parallel entanglement swapping processes can significantly enhance the performance of entanglement distribution networks, suggesting that they could play a key role in the design of future quantum network architectures.