Quantum communication can enable new features that are provably impossible with classical communication alone. However, the optical fibers used to send the quantum information are inherently lossy. To overcome the exponential losses over distance so-called quantum repeaters are needed to amplify the signal. As opposed to memory-based approaches, the third generation of quantum repeaters, also called one-way quantum repeaters do not require two-way communication thus enabling very high communication rates. In particular, the one-way quantum repeater based on photonic tree states proposed by Borregaard et al. (2019) realizes this task with a very modest amount of resources. Nevertheless, the method considered is susceptible to operational errors. In this work, we propose the use of code concatenation of a stabilizer code and the tree code, so that by measuring stabilizers of the stabilizer code and applying the syndrome corrections we can achieve a fault-tolerant one-way quantum repeater. In order to do so, we present a detailed protocol that uses the 5-qubit code. Moreover, we develop the first fully general simulation framework for studying the performance of tree-code based one-way quantum repeater chains, which in this thesis is used to perform an analysis of the proposed protocol. We find that the code-concatenation protocol under consideration has a similar tolerance against operational errors to the protocol proposed by Borregaard et al. (2019). Unfortunately, we are not able to draw a distinction between the tolerance of the two approaches. We do however suggest modified protocols that may provide fault tolerance. Studying these is beyond the scope of this thesis.
Quantum communication can enable new features that are provably impossible with classical communication alone. However, the optical fibers used to send the quantum information are inherently lossy. To overcome the exponential losses over distance so-called quantum repeaters are needed to amplify the signal. As opposed to memory-based approaches, the third generation of quantum repeaters, also called one-way quantum repeaters do not require two-way communication thus enabling very high communication rates. In particular, the one-way quantum repeater based on photonic tree states proposed by Borregaard et al. (2019) realizes this task with a very modest amount of resources. Nevertheless, the method considered is susceptible to operational errors. In this work, we propose the use of code concatenation of a stabilizer code and the tree code, so that by measuring stabilizers of the stabilizer code and applying the syndrome corrections we can achieve a fault-tolerant one-way quantum repeater. In order to do so, we present a detailed protocol that uses the 5-qubit code. Moreover, we develop the first fully general simulation framework for studying the performance of tree-code based one-way quantum repeater chains, which in this thesis is used to perform an analysis of the proposed protocol. We find that the code-concatenation protocol under consideration has a similar tolerance against operational errors to the protocol proposed by Borregaard et al. (2019). Unfortunately, we are not able to draw a distinction between the tolerance of the two approaches. We do however suggest modified protocols that may provide fault tolerance. Studying these is beyond the scope of this thesis.
One-way quantum repeaters where loss and operational errors are counteracted by quantum error-correcting codes can ensure fast and reliable qubit transmission in quantum networks. It is crucial that the resource requirements of such repeaters, for example, the number of qubits per repeater node and the complexity of the quantum error-correcting operations are kept to a minimum to allow for near-future implementations. To this end, we propose a one-way quantum repeater that targets both the loss and operational error rates in a communication channel in a resource-efficient manner using code concatenation. Specifically, we consider a tree-cluster code as an inner loss-tolerant code concatenated with an outer 5-qubit code for protection against Pauli errors. Adopting flag-based stabilizer measurements, we show that intercontinental distances of up to 10,000 km can be bridged with a minimized resource overhead by interspersing repeater nodes that each specialize in suppressing either loss or operational errors. Our work demonstrates how tailored error-correcting codes can significantly lower the experimental requirements for long-distance quantum communication.
To realize long-distance quantum communication, it is crucial to design quantum repeater architectures that can deal with transmission losses and operational errors. Code concatenation of photonic graph codes is a promising way to achieve this; however, existing concatenated codes that can correct both transmission losses and operational errors are extremely hardware-demanding. We propose a one-way quantum repeater architecture based on concatenated ring graph codes and linear optical Bell-state measurements. We construct a scheme to generate the concatenated ring graph codes using quantum emitters, where the number of matter qubits scales linearly with concatenation depth. Furthermore, we devise a measurement strategy at each repeater station with a simple experimental setup where photons are measured in the order that they are created and show that entanglement swapping is fault-tolerant to both transmission losses and operational errors. This allows for long-distance quantum communication (>104 km) at a kHZ rate even in the presence of single qubit error rates ε>10−3.
Quantum repeaters constitute a promising platform for enabling long-distance quantum communication and may ultimately serve as the backbone of a secure quantum internet, a scalable quantum network, or a distributed quantum computer. An efficient approach to encoding qubits within an error correcting code is provided by bosonic codes, in which even a single oscillator mode can function as a sufficiently large physical system. In this work, we initially investigate the bosonic Gottesman Kitaev Preskill (GKP) code as a promising platform for loss correcting quantum repeaters, compatible with room temperature implementation, and analyse how loss and other noise sources propagate through the circuit using Heisenberg evolution. We analyse three quantum repeater protocols in which transmission loss is suppressed at the cost of logical errors, identifying a relay-like teleamplifier as the optimal scheme. This enables long distance quantum communication via densely packed nodes without higher-level encoding, and we evaluate the resulting secure key rates exploiting analog syndrome information. Furthermore, we propose a concatenated Bell-state measurement (CBSM) scheme with a modified parity encoding based on GKP qubits, CV measurement with teleamplifier and a clipping method that corrects transmission loss without introducing logical errors. This significantly enhances the possible secure key distance. We find that GKP based repeaters can achieve performance comparable to approaches relying on photonic qubits, while requiring orders of magnitude fewer qubits. Our parity encoded GKP repeater protocol achieves a substantially higher secret key rate than existing GKP based repeater schemes while maintaining a comparable resource overhead.
We develop protocols for generating loss-tolerant quantum tree-codes; these are designed to safeguard information against qubit losses, with wide applications in quantum communications. Contrary to previous proposals, our method enables fast encoding and decoding, thereby reducing losses due to the lagging and photon-reordering at the repeater stations. At the hardware level, we show how to achieve this with a single quantum emitter equipped with a feedback mechanism, which we leverage to engineer entangling gates between a fed-back qubit and multiple emitted qubits in parallel. In addition, analyzing typical patterns within the error-correction decoding graphs, we find optimizations of the structure of tree-codes, which enable improved performance by also reducing the code size; these are based on the introduction of in the code, which mimic the intrinsic adaptiveness of the recovery procedure. We show numerically that these improvements together significantly enhance the loss-correction performance. Specifically, focusing on quantum repeater protocols, we show that our fast recovery scheme (decoding-encoding) allows for improved repeater rates with smaller photon numbers per code.
Quantum communication enables various technological possibilities that are hard or impossible with classical communication. These include secure distribution of keys, transfer of quantum information and distributed quantum computation and sensing. Quantum communication relies on the ability to transmit a quantum state over some distance. Exponential photon loss from fibre inevitably limits the distance one would be able to achieve this over and therefore make use of these promising new technologies.Quantum repeaters have been proposed as a solution to this problem. Elementary repeater protocols involve dividing the channel into smaller segments with repeater nodes, distributing entanglement between these nodes and then performing swapping operations to connect entangled pairs and purification to correct operation errors. In the years since these elementary protocols, quantum repeaters have been through extensive theoretical improvements including utilising the benefits of quantum error correction to improve efficiency.However, the vast majority of these protocols are for discrete encodings of quantum information. There is significant interest in using continuous variable encodings of quantum information for quantum communication applications. This is motivated in part by the ease of generating, manipulating and detecting quantum states and additionally the increased compatibility with existing infrastructure. In this thesis we present one of the first quantum repeater protocols for continuous variable encodings of quantum information.The continuous variable quantum repeater we present in this thesis is based on concatenated error correction protocols that work to correct loss on any optical field state. We thoroughly investigate operation of this error correction protocol including the trade-offs associated with real implementations, various modifications to the error correction protocol as well as whether it can be implemented with current technology.We illustrate how these error correction protocols may be structured to form a quantum repeater that inhibits the exponential photon loss problem with a resource cost that scales polynomially with distance. We show that our continuous variable repeater is able to beat the fundamental bound on quantum communication without a repeater. Finally, we compare the performance of our first generation continuous variable repeater to existing first generation discrete variable protocols.
Quantum computation promises to revolutionize information processing by exploiting superposition and entanglement, enabling applications such as quantum simulation, combinatorial optimization, and secure quantum communication. Beyond individual processors, the quantum internet aims to connect quantum nodes through entanglement distribution, enabling distributed computation. However, quantum states are fragile: environmental interactions, imperfect gate operations, and measurement errors can quickly degrade encoded information. Reliable quantum computation therefore requires carefully designed quantum error-correcting codes and fault-tolerant protocols. Unlike classical redundancy schemes, quantum error correction must preserve delicate phase relationships and relies on indirect error detection through syndrome extraction with ancillary qubits, enabling error identification without collapsing encoded states. Topological codes, in particular, emerged early as the preferred choice for many architectures due to their planar structure, local interactions, and natural support for fault-tolerant logical operations. Color codes, for instance, allow transversal implementation of all Clifford gates, whereas non-Clifford operations require magic-state injection. More recent constructions, including quantum low-density parity-check codes, offer higher encoding rates and reduced resource overhead, but require long-range qubit connectivity and more complex protocols. Despite experimental progress, several challenges remain. Many platforms exhibit biased noise, motivating codes that exploit channel asymmetry. Real-time decoding remains a critical bottleneck, as fault-tolerant computation requires low-latency processing of rapidly generated syndrome data. Fault-tolerant logical state initialization also remains resource-intensive and scales poorly with code distance. Addressing these challenges, this thesis develops a unified framework spanning theory and experiment. It provides precise performance analysis of quantum error-correcting codes in the low physical error-rate regime, introduces codes tailored to biased noise, develops fast low-complexity decoding algorithms for real-time operation, and presents modular and efficient protocols for fault-tolerant state preparation of CSS codes. The latter is demonstrated experimentally through the preparation of a logical zero state of the Golay code on the Quantinuum H2 trapped-ion quantum computer.