We provide a protocol for qudit-type entanglement generation between two optical field modes, separated by lossy medium and distance up to 100 km, using weak local cross-Kerr interactions and linear optical scheme for probabilistic entanglement enhancement.
Entanglement represents an important resource for quantum information processing, but its generation itself requires physical resources that are limited. We propose a scheme for generating a wide class of entangled qudit-type states of optical field modes at sites separated by noisy medium when only weak optical nonlinearities are available at both sites. The protocol is also based on exploiting a weak probe field, transmitted between the sites and used for generation of quantum correlations between two spatially separated field modes. The idea of probabilistic entanglement enhancement by measurement is discussed and a corresponding scheme for measuring the probe field state with linear optics and photodetectors not resolving photon numbers is proposed. It is shown that the protocol is applicable in the case when limited efficiency and dark counts of photodetectors, decoherence, and uncertainty of nonlinear coupling constants are present.
We present a hybrid quantum repeater protocol for the long-distance distribution of atomic entangled states beyond qubits. In our scheme, imperfect noisy entangled pairs of two qudits, i.e., two discrete-variable d-level systems, each of, in principle, arbitrary dimension d, are initially shared between the intermediate stations of the channel. This is achieved via local, sufficiently strong light-matter interactions, involving optical coherent states and their transmission after these interactions, and optical measurements on the transmitted field modes, especially efficient continuous-variable homodyne detections (``hybrid'' here refers to the simultaneous exploitation of discrete- and continuous-variable degrees of freedom for the local processing and storage of entangled states as well as their nonlocal distribution, respectively) and unambiguous state discrimination. For qutrits we quantify the light-matter entanglement that can be effectively shared through an elementary lossy channel, and for a repeater spacing of up to 10 km we show that the realistic (lossy) qutrit entanglement is even larger than any ideal (loss-free) qubit entanglement. After including qudit entanglement purification and swapping procedures, we calculate the long-distance entangled-pair distribution rates and the final entangled-state fidelities for total communication distances of up to 1280 km. For example, employing unambiguous state discrimination, with three rounds of purification, entangled qudit pairs of near-unit fidelity can be distributed over 1280 km at an ideal maximal rate (assuming perfect gate operations) on the order of 100 Hz.
We propose a protocol for creating arbitrary qudit state (including entangled states) with arbitrary dimensionality in continuous variable system using weak cross-Kerr nonlinearity, linear beamsplitters, detectors not resolving photon numbers, and sources of coherent states. The equation for unique determination of the used coherent states amplitudes is found. The protocol is applicable for creating entangled states at distances of 100 km using cross-Kerr nonlinearity χ ≥ χ min ≃ 0.01 and optical fiber quantum channel.