Measurement based entanglement under conditions of extreme photon loss

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to generate and utilize low-grade entanglement from photon detection events under high photon loss, enabling more efficient quantum information processing with fewer qubits and greater loss tolerance.

Contribution

It introduces a technique to exploit noisy entanglement heralded by single-photon detection, improving performance in high-loss quantum communication scenarios.

Findings

Linear increase in failure rate with photon loss.

Order-of-magnitude performance gains with high-loss devices.

Requires only two qubits per node for entanglement and operations.

Abstract

The act of measuring optical emissions from two remote qubits can entangle them. By demanding that a photon from each qubit reaches the detectors, one can ensure than no photon was lost. But the failure rate then rises quadratically with loss probability. In [1] this resulted in 30 successes per billion attempts. We describe a means to exploit the low grade entanglement heralded by the detection of a lone photon: A subsequent perfect operation is quickly achieved by consuming this noisy resource. We require only two qubits per node, and can tolerate both path length variation and loss asymmetry. The impact of photon loss upon the failure rate is then linear; realistic high-loss devices can gain orders of magnitude in performance and thus support QIP.