Creation of high-quality long-distance entanglement with flexible resources

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible quantum repeater protocol that efficiently generates high-quality entangled photon segments over long distances, significantly reducing the time needed for practical quantum communication.

Contribution

The scheme allows arbitrary input states at repeater stations, accelerating entanglement generation and simplifying long-distance entanglement connection.

Findings

High-rate generation of near-Bell state entanglement segments

Simplified and faster long-distance entanglement connection

Potential to produce high-quality entangled pairs within classical communication times

Abstract

We present a quantum repeater protocol that generates the elementary segments of entangled photons through the communication of qubus in coherent states. The input photons at the repeater stations can be in arbitrary states to save the local state preparation time for the operations. The flexibility of the scheme accelerates the generation of the elementary segments (close to the exact Bell states) to a high rate for practical quantum communications. The entanglement connection to long distances is simplified and sped up, possibly realizing an entangled pair of high quality within the time in the order of that for classical communication between two far-away locations.