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Scientific Reports

Heralded quantum repeater based on the scattering of photons off single emitters using parametric down-conversion source

Guo‐Zhu Song, Fang-Zhou Wu, Mei Zhang, Guojian Yang

Published Jun 28, 2016• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum repeater is the key element in quantum communication and quantum information processing. Here, we investigate the possibility of achieving a heralded quantum repeater based on the scattering of photons off single emitters in one-dimensional waveguides. We design the compact quantum circuits for nonlocal entanglement generation, entanglement swapping, and entanglement purification, and discuss the feasibility of our protocols with current experimental technology. In our scheme, we use a parametric down-conversion source instead of ideal single-photon sources to realize the heralded quantum repeater. Moreover, our protocols can turn faulty events into the detection of photon polarization, and the fidelity can reach 100% in principle. Our scheme is attractive and scalable, since it can be realized with artificial solid-state quantum systems. With developed experimental technique on controlling emitter-waveguide systems, the repeater may be very useful in long-distance quantum communication.

DOI
10.1038/srep28744

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Quantum repeater is the key element in quantum communication and quantum information processing. Here, we investigate the possibility of achieving a heralded quantum repeater based on the scattering of photons off single emitters in one-dimensional waveguides. We design the compact quantum circuits for nonlocal entanglement generation, entanglement swapping, and entanglement purification, and discuss the feasibility of our protocols with current experimental technology. In our scheme, we use a parametric down-conversion source instead of ideal single-photon sources to realize the heralded quantum repeater. Moreover, our protocols can turn faulty events into the detection of photon polarization, and the fidelity can reach 100% in principle. Our scheme is attractive and scalable, since it can be realized with artificial solid-state quantum systems. With developed experimental technique on controlling emitter-waveguide systems, the repeater may be very useful in long-distance quantum communication.
Distributing entangled states over potentially long distances provides a key resource for many protocols in quantum communication and quantum cryptography. Ideally, this should be implemented in a heralded manner. Starting with four single-photon states, we cascade two single-photon path-entangled states, coded in orthogonal polarizations, to distribute and herald polarization entanglement in a single quantum repeater link architecture. By tuning the input states to minimize (local) losses, the theoretically achievable fidelity to the target state without postselection approaches 1, while sacrificing heralding rates. We achieve a fidelity to the target state of over 95% after postselection, providing a benchmark for the experimental control and allowing a first demonstration of a device-independent quantum key distribution architecture capable of operation over relevant distances. We show that the fidelity of the heralded state without postselection scales predictably and also identify various practical challenges and error sources specific to this architecture, and model their effects on the generated state. While our experiment uses probabilistic photon-pair sources based on spontaneous parametric downconversion, many of these problems are also relevant for variants employing deterministic photon sources.
Quantum repeater is one of the important building blocks for long distance quantum communication network. The previous quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optical elements can only be performed with a maximal success probability of 1/2 during the entanglement creation and entanglement swapping procedures. Meanwhile, the polarization noise during the entanglement distribution process is harmful to the entangled channel created. Here we introduce a general interface between a polarized photon and an atomic ensemble trapped in a single-sided optical cavity, and with which we propose a high-efficiency quantum repeater protocol in which the robust entanglement distribution is accomplished by the stable spatial-temporal entanglement and it can in principle create the deterministic entanglement between neighboring atomic ensembles in a heralded way as a result of cavity quantum electrodynamics. Meanwhile, the simplified parity-check gate makes the entanglement swapping be completed with unity efficiency, other than 1/2 with linear optics. We detail the performance of our protocol with current experimental parameters and show its robustness to the imperfections, i.e., detuning and coupling variation, involved in the reflection process. These good features make it a useful building block in long distance quantum communication.
Universal quantum gates play a critical role in quantum information processing. Here, based on the scattering property of photons off single emitters in one-dimensional waveguides, we present some heralded protocols for realizing controlled-not, Toffoli, and Fredkin gates on hybrid systems. The control qubit of our gates is encoded on a flying photon, and the target qubits are encoded in the degenerate ground states of the emitter. In our schemes, the faulty scattering processes between emitters and photons caused by system imperfections can be transformed into the detection of photon polarization. That is, our three quantum gates are accomplished in a heralded way. Moreover, the quantum circuits for the three gates are versatile and compact, and no additional qubits are required. With current technique on manipulating the emitter-waveguide system, our protocols may be experimentally feasible. This work provides an effective avenue for implementing quantum logic gates.
We present a quantum repeater protocol for distributing entanglement over long distances, where a dedicated communication stage enables trial rates not limited by the travel time between repeater nodes. To accomplish this, each node contains several qubits that can couple to one single-photon emitter. Photons from the emitters in neighboring nodes generate heralded entanglement between qubits in these nodes. The protocol leaves the emitters disentangled from the rest of the system immediately after emitting the photons, thus allowing them to be reused to entangle other qubits without waiting for the repeater link round-trip time. This time multiplexing increases the protocol trial rate by up to an order of magnitude. The protocol is then combined with conventional deterministic entanglement swapping and heralded entanglement purification to extend the entanglement distance and reduce the entanglement error, respectively. We perform a complete protocol analysis by considering all relevant error sources, such as initialization, two-qubit gate, and qubit measurement errors, as well as the exponential decoherence of the qubits with time. The latter is particularly important since we analyze the protocol performance for a broad range of experimental parameters and obtain secret key rates ranging from 1 to 1000 Hz at a distance of 1000 km. Our results suggest that it is important to reach a qubit memory coherence time of around 1 s, and two-qubit gate and measurement errors on the order of 10 − 3 to obtain reasonable secret key rates over distances longer than achievable with direct transmission. While this work focuses on optimizing secret key rates, the protocol can also be used for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen pair generation and is thus also relevant for, e.g., distributed quantum computing.
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.
We propose a heralded quantum repeater protocol based on the general interface between the circularly polarized photon and the quantum dot embedded in a double-sided optical microcavity. Our effective time-bin encoding on photons results in the deterministic faithful entanglement distribution with one optical fiber for the transmission of each photon in our protocol, not two or more. Our efficient parity-check detector implemented with only one input-output process of a single photon as a result of cavity quantum electrodynamics makes the entanglement channel extension and entanglement purification in quantum repeater far more efficient than others, and it has the potential application in fault-tolerant quantum computation as well. Meanwhile, the deviation from a collective-noise channel leads to some phase-flip errors on the nonlocal electron spins shared by the parties and these errors can be depressed by our simplified entanglement purification process. Finally, we discuss the performance of our proposal, concluding that it is feasible with current technology.