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arXiv:2510.26009 · Advanced Quantum Technologies

A Zero‐Added‐Loss Multiplexing (ZALM) Source Simulation

Jerry Horgan, Alexander Nico-Katz, Shelbi L. Jenkins, Ashley N. Tittelbaugh, Vivek Vasan, Rohan Bali, Marco Ruffini, Boulat A. Bash, Daniel C. Kilper

Published Mar 1, 2026• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

ABSTRACT Zero‐Added‐Loss Multiplexing (ZALM) offers broadband, per‐channel–heralded EPR pairs, with a rich parameter space that allows its performance to be tailored for specific applications. This modular ZALM simulator demonstrates how design choices affect output rate and fidelity. Built in NetSquid with QSI controllers, it exposes 20+ tunable parameters, supports “IDEAL” and “REALISTIC” modes, and provides reusable components for spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) sources, interference, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) filtering, fiber delay, active polarization gates, detectors, and lossy fiber. Physics‐based models capture Hong‐Ou‐Mandel (HOM) visibility, insertion loss, detector efficiency, gate errors, and attenuation. Trade‐offs among fidelity, link distance, and entangled pairs per use, are mapped and show how SPDC bandwidth and DWDM grid spacing steer performance. Using the default configuration settings, average fidelity remains constant at 0.83 but the entangled qubit (ebit) rate decreases from 0.0175 at the source to 0.0 at 50 km; narrowing the SPDC degeneracy bandwidth increases the ebit rate significantly without affecting fidelity. The simulator enables co‐design of source, filtering, and feed‐forward settings for specific quantum memories and integrates as a building block for end‐to‐end quantum‐network studies.

DOI
10.1002/qute.202500810

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Spontaneous parametric down-converters (SPDCs) are the best available entanglement sources for distributing entanglement in a quantum internet. However, their intrinsically probabilistic nature, and their need to operate at low brightness to suppress multipair events, dictate that multiplexed SPDC arrays are required for high-rate distribution in that application. Early SPDC multiplexing proposals involved path switching, whose switching losses significantly degrade performance. The present paper proposes and analyzes a scheme for spectral multiplexing that provides entanglement-distribution rates well in excess of the state of the art. It builds on zero-added-loss multiplexing (ZALM)~[Phys. Rev. Appl. {\bf 19}, 054029 (2023)] for high-rate heralded entanglement generation, which does not require a switched array of SPDCs. Our ZALM's SPDCs rely on nonlinear crystals with $N_I$ phase-matched spectral islands, each generating two-mode squeezed-vacuum states. Also, our ZALM's multiplexing protocol uses both same-island and cross-island heralding, which allows the entanglement-delivery rate to approximately scale as $N_I^2$ in the realistic weak-squeezing regime. As a result, our scheme uses an order of magnitude fewer spectral channels than the original ZALM proposal, which may enable near-term implementations of satellite-to-ground or fiber-optic based ZALM architectures.

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Jeffrey H. Shapiro, Clark Embleton, Joseph Richardson

High-rate, high-fidelity entanglement distribution is essential for the creation of a quantum internet, and spontaneous parametric downconverters (SPDCs) are, at present, the preferred sources of entangled signal-idler photon pairs for transmission to Alice and Bob’s quantum nodes. SPDCs using phase-matched spectral islands are especially attractive in this regard because they provide wavelength-division-multiplexed signal-idler pairs with single-mode temporal behavior. This paper compares the entanglement distribution rates of islands-based zero-added-loss multiplexing (ZALM), which uses idler detections for heralding, and an islands-based Sagnac SPDC source, which operates without heralding. For 90% heralding efficiency with Alice and Bob’s receivers allocating a single quantum memory per pump pulse, ZALM’s per-pump-pulse entanglement distribution rate with 10 or more islands significantly exceeds that of unheralded operation. However, the reverse is true when both systems employ N I spectral islands and allocate N M = N I quantum memories to each pump pulse. Moreover, these behaviors must be weighed against the two systems’ differing equipment requirements, e.g., ZALM requires two perfectly matched Sagnac sources, and it suffers in comparison with unheralded operation if it cannot realize high heralding efficiency.

Optics Express•May 22, 2026•0 citations
ABSTRACT Zero‐Added‐Loss Multiplexing (ZALM) offers broadband, per‐channel–heralded EPR pairs, with a rich parameter space that allows its performance to be tailored for specific applications. This modular ZALM simulator demonstrates how design choices affect output rate and fidelity. Built in NetSquid with QSI controllers, it exposes 20+ tunable parameters, supports “IDEAL” and “REALISTIC” modes, and provides reusable components for spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) sources, interference, dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) filtering, fiber delay, active polarization gates, detectors, and lossy fiber. Physics‐based models capture Hong‐Ou‐Mandel (HOM) visibility, insertion loss, detector efficiency, gate errors, and attenuation. Trade‐offs among fidelity, link distance, and entangled pairs per use, are mapped and show how SPDC bandwidth and DWDM grid spacing steer performance. Using the default configuration settings, average fidelity remains constant at 0.83 but the entangled qubit (ebit) rate decreases from 0.0175 at the source to 0.0 at 50 km; narrowing the SPDC degeneracy bandwidth increases the ebit rate significantly without affecting fidelity. The simulator enables co‐design of source, filtering, and feed‐forward settings for specific quantum memories and integrates as a building block for end‐to‐end quantum‐network studies.
High-rate, high-fidelity entanglement distribution is essential to the creation of a quantum internet, but recent achievements in fiber (248 km at a 9- s − 1 rate) and satellite-based (1200 km at a 1.1- s − 1 rate) entanglement distribution fall far short of what is needed. Chen . [Phys. Rev. Appl. , 054209 (2023)] proposed a means for dramatically increasing entanglement-distribution rates via a scheme they called zero-added-loss multiplexing (ZALM). ZALM’s quantum transmitter employs a pair of Sagnac-configured spontaneous parametric down-converters (SPDCs), channelization via dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) filtering, and partial Bell-state measurements (BSMs) to realize a heralded source of frequency-multiplexed polarization-entangled biphotons. Each biphoton is transmitted to Alice and Bob along with a classical message identifying its frequency channel and whether a ψ − singlet or a ψ + triplet was heralded. Alice’s and Bob’s quantum receivers then use DWDM filtering and temporal-mode conversion to interface their received biphotons to intracavity color-center quantum memories. This paper delves deeply into ZALM’s SPDCs, partial BSMs, and Duan-Kimble loading of Alice’s and Bob’s quantum memories. Its principal results—the density operators for the SPDC sources and the quantum memories—allow heralding probability, heralding efficiency, and fidelity to be evaluated for both the polarization-entangled biphotons and the loaded quantum memories, thus enabling exploration of the parameter space for optimizing ZALM’s performance. Even without a comprehensive optimization analysis, the paper’s examples already demonstrate two critical features of the ZALM architecture: (1) the necessity of achieving a near-separable channelized biphoton wave function to ensure that the biphoton sent to Alice and Bob is of high purity; and (2) the premium placed on Alice’s and Bob’s temporal-mode converters enabling narrowband push-pull memory loading to ensure that the arriving biphoton’s state is faithfully transferred to the intracavity color centers. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Zero-added-loss multiplexing (ZALM)~[Phys. Rev. Appl. {\bf 19}, 054029 (2023)] is a midpoint-source scheme for entanglement distribution. Its quantum transmitter (QTX) employs two Sagnac sources of polarization-entangled pairs plus partial Bell-state measurements (BSMs) on their idler outputs to herald entanglement in their signal outputs, thus avoiding the switching losses suffered by other multiplexing approaches. When its Sagnac sources' spontaneous parametric downconverters (SPDCs) utilize χ(2)χ^{(2)}χ(2) crystals with phase-matched spectral islands, ZALM avoids the tradeoff between heralding efficiency and output-state fidelity incurred when conventional-crystal SPDCs' outputs are channelized by dense wavelength-division multiplexing filters. This paper reports an end-to-end fidelity and rate analysis for islands-based ZALM that includes: SPDC multipair emissions of all orders and partial-BSM losses in the ZALM QTX; loss in propagation from the ZALM QTX to Alice and Bob's quantum receivers (QRXs); loss and mode mismatch in the mode converters employed at Alice and Bob's QRXs; and loss in the partial-BSM loading of Alice and Bob's emissive quantum memories.
Boosting the communication rate of quantum networks is a central challenge in quantum information science. Recently, an efficient entanglement distribution scheme employing quasi-deterministic Bell-pair sources based on time-frequency multiplexing, referred to as zero-added-loss multiplexing~(ZALM), has been proposed. Its implementation, however, requires high-fidelity entanglement swapping across densely multiplexed time-frequency modes, which has remained an experimental challenge. Here we demonstrate entanglement swapping across 16 parallel frequency modes with a high average fidelity of 93.9±\pm±\SI{1.4}{\%}. Notably, polarization-entangled photon pairs in each frequency mode are spectrally single-mode using only off-the-shelf 50-GHz dense wavelength-division multiplexing~(DWDM) filters, eliminating the need for additional narrowband filtering. Furthermore, in order to fully exploit the temporal degree of freedom, the pump pulse is operated with a repetition frequency of \SI{3.0}{GHz}. By combining the frequency and time multiplexing, the total swapping rate reaches 5.38$\pm$0.17\,\si{pairs\,s^{-1}}, which corresponds to the ZALM Bell-pair rate of \SI{8.2e2}{pairs\,s^{-1}}. Our results establish the key experimental capabilities required for ZALM and demonstrate a scalable route toward practical high-rate quantum repeaters and long-haul quantum networks.
We propose a scheme for optical entanglement distribution in quantum networks based on a quasideterministic entangled photon-pair source. By combining heralded photonic Bell-pair generation with spectral mode conversion to interface with quantum memories, the scheme eliminates switching losses due to multiplexing in the source. We analyze this ``zero-added-loss multiplexing'' (ZALM) Bell-pair source for the particularly challenging problem of long-baseline entanglement distribution via satellites and ground-based memories, where it unlocks additional advantages: (i) the substantially higher channel efficiency $\ensuremath{\eta}$ of downlinks versus uplinks with realistic adaptive optics, and (ii) photon loss occurring before interaction with the quantum memory---i.e., Alice and Bob receiving rather than transmitting---improve entanglement generation rate scaling by $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{\ensuremath{\eta}})$. Based on numerical analyses, we estimate our protocol to achieve >10ebit/s>10\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\text{ebit/s}>10ebit/s at memory multiplexing of 102{10}^{2}102 spin qubits for ground distance >102km>{10}^{2}\phantom{\rule{0.2em}{0ex}}\text{km}>102km, with the spin-spin Bell-state fidelity exceeding 99%. Our architecture presents a blueprint for realizing global-scale quantum networks in the near term.
Spontaneous parametric down-converters (SPDCs) are the best available entanglement sources for distributing entanglement in a quantum internet. However, their intrinsically probabilistic nature, and their need to operate at low brightness to suppress multipair events, dictate that multiplexed SPDC arrays are required for high-rate distribution in that application. Early SPDC multiplexing proposals involved path switching, whose switching losses significantly degrade performance. The present paper proposes and analyzes a scheme for spectral multiplexing that provides entanglement-distribution rates well in excess of the state of the art. It builds on zero-added-loss multiplexing (ZALM)~[Phys. Rev. Appl. {\bf 19}, 054029 (2023)] for high-rate heralded entanglement generation, which does not require a switched array of SPDCs. Our ZALM's SPDCs rely on nonlinear crystals with NIN_INI​ phase-matched spectral islands, each generating two-mode squeezed-vacuum states. Also, our ZALM's multiplexing protocol uses both same-island and cross-island heralding, which allows the entanglement-delivery rate to approximately scale as NI2N_I^2NI2​ in the realistic weak-squeezing regime. As a result, our scheme uses an order of magnitude fewer spectral channels than the original ZALM proposal, which may enable near-term implementations of satellite-to-ground or fiber-optic based ZALM architectures.
High-rate, high-fidelity entanglement distribution is essential for the creation of a quantum internet, and spontaneous parametric downconverters (SPDCs) are, at present, the preferred sources of entangled signal-idler photon pairs for transmission to Alice and Bob’s quantum nodes. SPDCs using phase-matched spectral islands are especially attractive in this regard because they provide wavelength-division-multiplexed signal-idler pairs with single-mode temporal behavior. This paper compares the entanglement distribution rates of islands-based zero-added-loss multiplexing (ZALM), which uses idler detections for heralding, and an islands-based Sagnac SPDC source, which operates without heralding. For 90% heralding efficiency with Alice and Bob’s receivers allocating a single quantum memory per pump pulse, ZALM’s per-pump-pulse entanglement distribution rate with 10 or more islands significantly exceeds that of unheralded operation. However, the reverse is true when both systems employ N I spectral islands and allocate N M = N I quantum memories to each pump pulse. Moreover, these behaviors must be weighed against the two systems’ differing equipment requirements, e.g., ZALM requires two perfectly matched Sagnac sources, and it suffers in comparison with unheralded operation if it cannot realize high heralding efficiency.