At the heart of building a large-scale quantum internet lies the challenge of establishing long-distance entanglement using quantum repeaters, which mitigate direct transmission losses but introduce additional noise in the nodes via interactions with the environment and imperfect operations. This effect has typically been studied under a simplifying Pauli channel assumption. Our study focuses on distributing end-to-end entanglement in a homogeneous, repeater-based linear quantum network operating under a non-Pauli noise, specifically, amplitude damping noise, which we refer to as amplitude damping-affected quantum network (AQN). Unlike its twirled counterpart (TAQN), where the resulting state is fully Bell-diagonal with a single parameter, we prove that the AQN produces a block-diagonal state in the Bell basis with four parameters. We develop a method for the simulation of AQN, where we keep track of these four parameters of each entangled link, along with the number of times noise acts on it, i.e., its age, until it is consumed for swapping. Our results reveal that across diverse policies, including NESTING and SWAP-ASAP, AQN consistently outperforms TAQN in terms of both fidelity and average entanglement. The benefit is most significant in the low-probability regime of elementary link generation, highly relevant for near-term experiments. Notably, we also identify the coherence-time and link-probability regions where TAQN fails while AQN succeeds in distributing end-to-end entanglement.
At the heart of building a large-scale quantum internet lies the challenge of establishing long-distance entanglement using quantum repeaters, which mitigate direct transmission losses but introduce additional noise in the nodes via interactions with the environment and imperfect operations. This effect has typically been studied under a simplifying Pauli channel assumption. Our study focuses on distributing end-to-end entanglement in a homogeneous, repeater-based linear quantum network operating under a non-Pauli noise, specifically, amplitude damping noise, which we refer to as amplitude damping-affected quantum network (AQN). Unlike its twirled counterpart (TAQN), where the resulting state is fully Bell-diagonal with a single parameter, we prove that the AQN produces a block-diagonal state in the Bell basis with four parameters. We develop a method for the simulation of AQN, where we keep track of these four parameters of each entangled link, along with the number of times noise acts on it, i.e., its age, until it is consumed for swapping. Our results reveal that across diverse policies, including NESTING and SWAP-ASAP, AQN consistently outperforms TAQN in terms of both fidelity and average entanglement. The benefit is most significant in the low-probability regime of elementary link generation, highly relevant for near-term experiments. Notably, we also identify the coherence-time and link-probability regions where TAQN fails while AQN succeeds in distributing end-to-end entanglement.
Abstract In this paper, we consider an efficient dual-hop quantum communication network with multiple senders or nodes, a repeater, and a receiver. We derive closed-form expressions for the system quantum outage probability (QOP) assuming time-varying amplitude damping (TVAD) quantum channels. In addition, closed-form expressions for the quantum hashing outage probability of two approximated quantum channels, namely TVAD Pauli twirl approximated (TVADPTA) and TVAD Clifford twirl approximated (TVADCTA) channels are also provided. These channels are efficient in modeling the simplest kind of noise in quantum devices. Opportunistic node scheduling is proposed, for the first time, to select among sending nodes, where the node of the largest relaxation time T 1 is allowed to transmit to repeater, which in turn communicates with receiver. The impact of various system parameters, including number of sending nodes K , coefficient of variation of relaxation time ϵ , code rates of both hops, channel damping parameter γ , and channel noise limit γ l ( R ) on the system performance is investigated. Findings show that for the case where first hop is dominating the system performance, the more the number of nodes, the better the achieved performance. This gain starts to vanish once the second hop starts dominating the system performance. For good quality channels, more nodes are needed in order for second hop to dominate the system performance compared to the case of low quality channels. Finally, results illustrate that for higher values of ϵ , and in order to achieve a certain target QOP, both nodes and repeater need to adapt their transmission rates to the optimum values.
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.
Long-distance quantum communication requires reliable entanglement distribution, but direct generation with protocols such as Barrett--Kok suffers from exponentially decreasing success probability with distance, making it impractical over hundreds of kilometers. Quantum repeaters address this by segmenting the channel and combining entanglement generation, swapping, and purification. In this work, we present a simulation framework for chain-based repeaters under continuous-time depolarizing noise. Our model implements heralded entanglement generation, Bell-state swapping, and multi-round purification, with configurable chain length, noise levels, and purification depth. Numerical results highlight how memory decoherence constrains performance, how purification mitigates fidelity loss, and how time and entanglement costs scale with distance. While simplified, the framework offers a flexible tool for exploring trade-offs in repeater design and provides a basis for extensions toward more complex network scenarios.
We systematically characterize quantum entanglement in all sixteen combinations of two-qubit Bell states across three operational regimes: pure superposition, noiseless mixing, and asymmetric mixing of one noisy and one pure Bell state. For pure superpositions, we calculate the von Neumann entropy and show that entanglement depends critically on the relative phase phi between superposed states. For mixed states, we use concurrence C under three physically motivated decoherence channels. The Depolarizing (DP) and Phase Damping (PD) channels are modeled as global, collective operations on the two-qubit Hilbert space, while Amplitude Damping (AD) is treated as independent local decay on each qubit, reflecting the asymmetric, energy-dissipating nature of spontaneous emission. A central and counterintuitive result is that increasing noise can raise concurrence in specific parameter regimes across all three channels. We further map the boundary between mathematical entanglement (C > 0) and operational quantum non-locality using the Horodecki criterion, finding this boundary to be strongly channel-dependent. Under Phase Damping, the Bell-local entanglement regime vanishes entirely for identical and same-bases mixtures, meaning any surviving entanglement guarantees a CHSH violation. Under Depolarizing noise, a large Bell-local region requires mixing probability r > 1/sqrt(2) to recover non-locality at maximum noise. For Amplitude Damping, certain mixtures exhibit a non-monotonic Horodecki parameter M(T): concurrence decreases monotonically with noise, yet the capacity for CHSH violation is lost at intermediate noise levels and restored at high noise, as maximal damping repurifies the noisy branch. These results provide a unified analytical reference for entanglement and non-locality management across Bell-state combinations and decoherence channels relevant to NISQ architectures.
We propose a method to directly recover the degree of entanglement distributed by entanglement swapping in the presence of noise. Our approach introduces a reversing operation that probabilistically undoes the effect of amplitude damping or photon loss on a single entangled pair, enabling heralded recovery of entanglement. We demonstrate that entanglement can be substantially recovered even under strong noise, including parameter regimes where the distributed entanglement would otherwise vanish due to entanglement sudden death. We analyze the effectiveness of the protocol in two representative repeater models, i.e.,~two-way and one-way architectures and identify the optimal reversing strategy. Due to its heralded and single-copy nature, our protocol is readily compatible with other entanglement recovery techniques such as entanglement purification and distillation. Our work provides a practical and experimentally feasible way toward robust entanglement distribution in current and near-term quantum repeater architectures.
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.