Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

International Conference on Quantum Communications, Networking, and Computing (QCNC)

Extending Repeater Spacing in All-Photonic Quantum Repeaters

Ryosuke Shiina, Kenneth Goodenough, Filip Rozpędek

Published Apr 6, 2026• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum communication between two distant parties will serve as a cornerstone of the future quantum internet. However, many existing quantum communication schemes face a critical bottleneck: the need to generate a sufficient number of entangled Bell pairs over long distances. Although photons are ideal carriers of quantum information, overcoming photon loss and the exponential attenuation of signals remains a major challenge. We propose an all-photonic quantum repeater architecture that enables quantum communication over a distance of$1,000 \text{km}$with equidistant repeater spacing extended to 9 km -approximately 2 to 6 times longer than in previously proposed all-photonic schemes. This extended repeater spacing arises from the combined use of elementary entangled Bell pairs protected by both continuous-variable and discrete-variable quantum error correction codes-namely, the bosonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code and the [[7], [1], [3]] Steane code-whose combination yields a synergistic effect that surpasses a simple additive improvement, enhancing robustness against photon loss. This architecture incorporates a new ranking criterion and a multi-reflection mirror-based optical cavity as a free-space photonic memory module, which we model in terms of its length and mirror-reflection efficiency. To more accurately capture realistic physical conditions during photonic resource preparation, we model the presence of switching-induced imperfections by introducing an optical switch into the simulation, in addition to commonly considered imperfections such as finite GKP squeezing, finite detection efficiency, and finite fiber coupling efficiency. In the presence of these imperfections, our realization requires fewer than$\mathbf{3, 8 0 0}$GKP qubits per repeater station per protocol run-a value significantly smaller than in prior all-photonic proposals.

DOI
10.1109/qcnc69040.2026.00011

Related papers

High-Rate and Resource-Efficient All-Photonic Quantum Repeater Architectures with 9 km Repeater Spacing

Ryosuke Shiina, Kenneth Goodenough, Nathan Arnold +1 more

Quantum communication between two distant parties will serve as a cornerstone of the future quantum internet. However, generating enough entangled Bell pairs over long distances is a critical bottleneck. Although photons are ideal carriers of quantum information, overcoming photon loss and the exponential attenuation of signals remains a major challenge. We propose an all-photonic quantum repeater architecture that enables quantum communication over 1,000 km with an equidistant repeater spacing of 9 km. This repeater spacing is enabled by elementary entangled Bell pairs protected through the concatenation of continuous-variable and discrete-variable quantum error correction codes, namely, the bosonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code and the [[7,1,3]] Steane code, whose combination yields a synergistic improvement in robustness against photon loss. This architecture incorporates a new ranking criterion and a multi-reflection mirror-based optical cavity as a free-space photonic memory module, which we model in terms of its length and mirror-reflection efficiency. Additionally, we propose two heuristic construction methods for the elementary entangled Bell pairs. One method introduces up to two-qubit correlated errors within each logical qubit but requires a large number of GKP qubits, while the other allows up to three-qubit correlated errors within each logical qubit but requires fewer GKP qubits. To more accurately capture realistic physical conditions during photonic resource preparation, we include switching-induced imperfections in our simulations, in addition to other standard optical imperfections. In the presence of these imperfections, our realization requires only a few thousand GKP qubits per repeater station per protocol run, a resource requirement significantly smaller than the corresponding resource requirements of prior third-generation all-photonic repeater proposals.

quant-pharXiv:2606.25314•Jun 25, 2026•0 citations

Long-distance quantum communication sending single photons and keeping many

Stefan Häussler, Peter van Loock

Fiber-based classical communication is all-optical and uses light pulses reamplified and reshaped every 50-100 km in classical repeaters. Most compatible with this would be a quantum communication system which is also all-optical with quantum processing units placed in similar intervals. However, existing all-optical quantum communication protocols either require complicated quantum error correction steps for logical-qubit recoveries at every few kilometers or, over larger quantum repeater segments, they would at least depend on sharing complex multi-photon entangled states. Here we propose an all-optical memory-based quantum repeater for long-distance quantum communication, with quantum memories at each repeater station realized in the form of fiber loops combined with suitable quantum error correction codes for photon-loss protection. By sending only single-photon states through the fibers connecting the stations, such repeaters can operate in the classical infrastructure's long-segment regime. We analyze the performance of our scheme for the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill code, including a concatenation with the Steane code, as well as the single-photon quantum parity code for total distances up to 10000 km.

quant-pharXiv:2512.18767•Dec 23, 2025•0 citations

All-photonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill–qubit repeater using analog-information-assisted multiplexed entanglement ranking

Filip Rozpędek, Kaushik Parasuram Seshadreesan, P. Polakos +2 more

Long-distance quantum communication will require the use of quantum repeaters to overcome the exponential attenuation of signal with distance. One class of such repeaters utilizes quantum error correction to overcome losses in the communication channel. Here we propose a strategy of using the bosonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code in a two-way repeater architecture with multiplexing. The crucial feature of the GKP code that we make use of is the fact that GKP qubits easily admit deterministic two-qubit gates, hence allowing for multiplexing without the need for generating large cluster states as required in previous all-photonic architectures based on discrete-variable codes. Moreover, alleviating the need for such clique clusters entails that we are no longer limited to extraction of at most one end-to-end entangled pair from a single protocol run. In fact, thanks to the availability of the analog information generated during the measurements of the GKP qubits, we can design better entanglement swapping procedures in which we connect links based on their estimated quality. This enables us to use all the multiplexed links so that large number of links from a single protocol run can contribute to the generation of the end-to-end entanglement. We find that our architecture allows for high-rate end-to-end entanglement generation and is resilient to imperfections arising from finite squeezing in the GKP state preparation and homodyne detection inefficiency. In particular we show that long-distance quantum communication over more than 1000 km is possible even with less than 13 dB of GKP squeezing. We also quantify the number of GKP qubits needed for the implementation of our scheme and find that for good hardware parameters our scheme requires around ${10}^{3}\ensuremath{-}{10}^{4}$ GKP qubits per repeater per protocol run.

arXiv:2303.14923•Physical Review Research•Oct 18, 2023•22 citations

Loss-Tolerant Quantum Communication via Bosonic-GKP-Parity-Encoding

S. Nibedita Swain, Timothy C. Ralph

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.

quant-pharXiv:2604.09002•Apr 13, 2026•0 citations

Finite-energy GKP-QPC architectures for photonic quantum memories and repeaters

Kaustav Chatterjee, Ulrik Lund Andersen

Photonic quantum networks require error-correction architectures that remain useful with finite-energy bosonic states, pure-loss fiber transmission, and explicit resource accounting. In this light, we study a concatenated architecture in which each physical rail is a finitely squeezed Gottesman--Kitaev--Preskill (GKP) qubit transmitted through a pure-loss fiber segment, corrected by teleportation-based GKP error correction with finitely squeezed ancillae, and decoded by an outer quantum parity code (QPC). The GKP layer converts continuous homodyne syndromes into effective rail-level Pauli marginals, while the QPC layer suppresses the residual qubit-level errors. For the concatenated code family considered here, we find a finite-squeezing threshold of $5.06\,\mathrm{dB}$ at zero propagation loss. In the memory setting, the QPC layer lowers the squeezing at which repeated error correction becomes beneficial from $6.7\,\mathrm{dB}$ for bare GKP correction to $5.2\,\mathrm{dB}$ for QPC$(3,3)$ and $4.3\,\mathrm{dB}$ for QPC$(5,5)$, and improves the average-fidelity ratio by up to $75$--$90\%$ in the relevant intermediate-noise regime. In the repeater setting, avoiding pre-amplification gives larger secret-key fractions at moderate squeezing, but also produces an optimal squeezing because highly squeezed GKP peaks become sensitive to loss-induced inward displacement. Resource-normalized rates show that QPC concatenation can exceed the repeaterless PLOB benchmark by orders of magnitude and extend the communication reach, at short repeater spacing, to distances of order $10^4$km with $14$dB squeezing. However, QPC concatenation becomes detrimental when each elementary hop is too lossy. These results provide quantitative design rules for finite-squeezing GKP--QPC quantum memories and repeaters.

quant-pharXiv:2608.15620•Aug 18, 2026•0 citations

All-optical long-distance quantum communication with Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill qubits

Kosuke Fukui, Rafael N. Alexander, Peter van Loock

Quantum repeaters are a promising platform for realizing long-distance quantum communication and thus could form the backbone of a secure quantum internet, a scalable quantum network, or a distributed quantum computer. Repeater protocols that encode information in single- or multiphoton states are limited by transmission losses and the cost of implementing entangling gates or Bell measurements. In this work, we consider implementing a quantum repeater protocol using Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) qubits. These qubits are natural elements for quantum repeater protocols, because they allow for deterministic Gaussian entangling operations and Bell measurements, which can be implemented at room temperature. The GKP encoding is also capable of correcting small displacement errors. At the cost of additional Gaussian noise, photon loss can be converted into a random displacement error channel by applying a phase-insensitive amplifier. Here we show that a similar conversion can be achieved in two-way repeater protocols by using phase-sensitive amplification applied in the postprocessing of the measurement data, resulting in less overall Gaussian noise per (sufficiently short) repeater segment. We also investigate concatenating the GKP code with higher-level qubit codes while leveraging analog syndrome data, postselection, and path-selection techniques to boost the rate of communication. We compute the secure key rates and find that GKP repeaters can achieve a comparative performance relative to methods based on photonic qubits while using orders-of-magnitude fewer qubits.

arXiv:2011.14876•Physical Review Research•Aug 5, 2021•79 citations
Quantum communication between two distant parties will serve as a cornerstone of the future quantum internet. However, many existing quantum communication schemes face a critical bottleneck: the need to generate a sufficient number of entangled Bell pairs over long distances. Although photons are ideal carriers of quantum information, overcoming photon loss and the exponential attenuation of signals remains a major challenge. We propose an all-photonic quantum repeater architecture that enables quantum communication over a distance of1,000km1,000 \text{km}1,000kmwith equidistant repeater spacing extended to 9 km -approximately 2 to 6 times longer than in previously proposed all-photonic schemes. This extended repeater spacing arises from the combined use of elementary entangled Bell pairs protected by both continuous-variable and discrete-variable quantum error correction codes-namely, the bosonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code and the [[7], [1], [3]] Steane code-whose combination yields a synergistic effect that surpasses a simple additive improvement, enhancing robustness against photon loss. This architecture incorporates a new ranking criterion and a multi-reflection mirror-based optical cavity as a free-space photonic memory module, which we model in terms of its length and mirror-reflection efficiency. To more accurately capture realistic physical conditions during photonic resource preparation, we model the presence of switching-induced imperfections by introducing an optical switch into the simulation, in addition to commonly considered imperfections such as finite GKP squeezing, finite detection efficiency, and finite fiber coupling efficiency. In the presence of these imperfections, our realization requires fewer than3,800\mathbf{3, 8 0 0}3,800GKP qubits per repeater station per protocol run-a value significantly smaller than in prior all-photonic proposals.
Quantum communication between two distant parties will serve as a cornerstone of the future quantum internet. However, generating enough entangled Bell pairs over long distances is a critical bottleneck. Although photons are ideal carriers of quantum information, overcoming photon loss and the exponential attenuation of signals remains a major challenge. We propose an all-photonic quantum repeater architecture that enables quantum communication over 1,000 km with an equidistant repeater spacing of 9 km. This repeater spacing is enabled by elementary entangled Bell pairs protected through the concatenation of continuous-variable and discrete-variable quantum error correction codes, namely, the bosonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code and the [[7,1,3]] Steane code, whose combination yields a synergistic improvement in robustness against photon loss. This architecture incorporates a new ranking criterion and a multi-reflection mirror-based optical cavity as a free-space photonic memory module, which we model in terms of its length and mirror-reflection efficiency. Additionally, we propose two heuristic construction methods for the elementary entangled Bell pairs. One method introduces up to two-qubit correlated errors within each logical qubit but requires a large number of GKP qubits, while the other allows up to three-qubit correlated errors within each logical qubit but requires fewer GKP qubits. To more accurately capture realistic physical conditions during photonic resource preparation, we include switching-induced imperfections in our simulations, in addition to other standard optical imperfections. In the presence of these imperfections, our realization requires only a few thousand GKP qubits per repeater station per protocol run, a resource requirement significantly smaller than the corresponding resource requirements of prior third-generation all-photonic repeater proposals.
Fiber-based classical communication is all-optical and uses light pulses reamplified and reshaped every 50-100 km in classical repeaters. Most compatible with this would be a quantum communication system which is also all-optical with quantum processing units placed in similar intervals. However, existing all-optical quantum communication protocols either require complicated quantum error correction steps for logical-qubit recoveries at every few kilometers or, over larger quantum repeater segments, they would at least depend on sharing complex multi-photon entangled states. Here we propose an all-optical memory-based quantum repeater for long-distance quantum communication, with quantum memories at each repeater station realized in the form of fiber loops combined with suitable quantum error correction codes for photon-loss protection. By sending only single-photon states through the fibers connecting the stations, such repeaters can operate in the classical infrastructure's long-segment regime. We analyze the performance of our scheme for the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill code, including a concatenation with the Steane code, as well as the single-photon quantum parity code for total distances up to 10000 km.
Long-distance quantum communication will require the use of quantum repeaters to overcome the exponential attenuation of signal with distance. One class of such repeaters utilizes quantum error correction to overcome losses in the communication channel. Here we propose a strategy of using the bosonic Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) code in a two-way repeater architecture with multiplexing. The crucial feature of the GKP code that we make use of is the fact that GKP qubits easily admit deterministic two-qubit gates, hence allowing for multiplexing without the need for generating large cluster states as required in previous all-photonic architectures based on discrete-variable codes. Moreover, alleviating the need for such clique clusters entails that we are no longer limited to extraction of at most one end-to-end entangled pair from a single protocol run. In fact, thanks to the availability of the analog information generated during the measurements of the GKP qubits, we can design better entanglement swapping procedures in which we connect links based on their estimated quality. This enables us to use all the multiplexed links so that large number of links from a single protocol run can contribute to the generation of the end-to-end entanglement. We find that our architecture allows for high-rate end-to-end entanglement generation and is resilient to imperfections arising from finite squeezing in the GKP state preparation and homodyne detection inefficiency. In particular we show that long-distance quantum communication over more than 1000 km is possible even with less than 13 dB of GKP squeezing. We also quantify the number of GKP qubits needed for the implementation of our scheme and find that for good hardware parameters our scheme requires around ${10}^{3}\ensuremath{-}{10}^{4}$ GKP qubits per repeater per protocol run.
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.
Photonic quantum networks require error-correction architectures that remain useful with finite-energy bosonic states, pure-loss fiber transmission, and explicit resource accounting. In this light, we study a concatenated architecture in which each physical rail is a finitely squeezed Gottesman--Kitaev--Preskill (GKP) qubit transmitted through a pure-loss fiber segment, corrected by teleportation-based GKP error correction with finitely squeezed ancillae, and decoded by an outer quantum parity code (QPC). The GKP layer converts continuous homodyne syndromes into effective rail-level Pauli marginals, while the QPC layer suppresses the residual qubit-level errors. For the concatenated code family considered here, we find a finite-squeezing threshold of 5.06 dB5.06\,\mathrm{dB}5.06dB at zero propagation loss. In the memory setting, the QPC layer lowers the squeezing at which repeated error correction becomes beneficial from 6.7 dB6.7\,\mathrm{dB}6.7dB for bare GKP correction to 5.2 dB5.2\,\mathrm{dB}5.2dB for QPC(3,3)(3,3)(3,3) and 4.3 dB4.3\,\mathrm{dB}4.3dB for QPC(5,5)(5,5)(5,5), and improves the average-fidelity ratio by up to 757575--90%90\%90% in the relevant intermediate-noise regime. In the repeater setting, avoiding pre-amplification gives larger secret-key fractions at moderate squeezing, but also produces an optimal squeezing because highly squeezed GKP peaks become sensitive to loss-induced inward displacement. Resource-normalized rates show that QPC concatenation can exceed the repeaterless PLOB benchmark by orders of magnitude and extend the communication reach, at short repeater spacing, to distances of order 10410^4104km with 141414dB squeezing. However, QPC concatenation becomes detrimental when each elementary hop is too lossy. These results provide quantitative design rules for finite-squeezing GKP--QPC quantum memories and repeaters.
Quantum repeaters are a promising platform for realizing long-distance quantum communication and thus could form the backbone of a secure quantum internet, a scalable quantum network, or a distributed quantum computer. Repeater protocols that encode information in single- or multiphoton states are limited by transmission losses and the cost of implementing entangling gates or Bell measurements. In this work, we consider implementing a quantum repeater protocol using Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) qubits. These qubits are natural elements for quantum repeater protocols, because they allow for deterministic Gaussian entangling operations and Bell measurements, which can be implemented at room temperature. The GKP encoding is also capable of correcting small displacement errors. At the cost of additional Gaussian noise, photon loss can be converted into a random displacement error channel by applying a phase-insensitive amplifier. Here we show that a similar conversion can be achieved in two-way repeater protocols by using phase-sensitive amplification applied in the postprocessing of the measurement data, resulting in less overall Gaussian noise per (sufficiently short) repeater segment. We also investigate concatenating the GKP code with higher-level qubit codes while leveraging analog syndrome data, postselection, and path-selection techniques to boost the rate of communication. We compute the secure key rates and find that GKP repeaters can achieve a comparative performance relative to methods based on photonic qubits while using orders-of-magnitude fewer qubits.