Long range failure-tolerant entanglement distribution

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel entanglement distribution protocol using topological encoding over a chain of repeater stations, capable of tolerating high defect rates and probabilistic failures, enabling long-range high-fidelity entanglement.

Contribution

It introduces the first protocol that explicitly accommodates probabilistic entanglement operations with high failure rates in long-range quantum communication.

Findings

Supports error rates over 10% between stations.

Allows unheralded errors as low as 0.01%.

Enables arbitrarily long high-fidelity entanglement distribution.

Abstract

We introduce a protocol to distribute entanglement between remote parties. Our protocol is based on a chain of repeater stations, and exploits topological encoding to tolerate very high levels of defects and errors. The repeater stations may employ probabilistic entanglement operations which usually fail; ours is the first protocol to explicitly allow for technologies of this kind. Given an error rate between stations in excess of 10%, arbitrarily long range high fidelity entanglement distribution is possible even if the heralded failure rate within the stations is as high as 99%, providing that unheralded errors are low (order 0.01%).