Heralded high-efficiency quantum repeater with atomic ensembles assisted by faithful single-photon transmission

TL;DR

This paper proposes a high-efficiency quantum repeater protocol using atomic ensembles and cavity QED, enabling near-deterministic entanglement distribution and perfect entanglement swapping, advancing long-distance quantum communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interface and protocol that achieve deterministic entanglement creation and unity-efficiency entanglement swapping, surpassing previous probabilistic methods.

Findings

Achieves near-deterministic entanglement distribution

Enables unity-efficiency entanglement swapping

Demonstrates robustness to experimental imperfections

Abstract

Quantum repeater is one of the important building blocks for long distance quantum communication network. The previous quantum repeaters based on atomic ensembles and linear optical elements can only be performed with a maximal success probability of 1/2 during the entanglement creation and entanglement swapping procedures. Meanwhile, the polarization noise during the entanglement distribution process is harmful to the entangled channel created. Here we introduce a general interface between a polarized photon and an atomic ensemble trapped in a single-sided optical cavity, and with which we propose a high-efficiency quantum repeater protocol in which the robust entanglement distribution is accomplished by the stable spatial-temporal entanglement and it can in principle create the deterministic entanglement between neighboring atomic ensembles in a heralded way as a result of cavity quantum electrodynamics. Meanwhile, the simplified parity check gate makes the entanglement swapping be completed with unity efficiency, other than 1/2 with linear optics. We detail the performance of our protocol with current experimental parameters and show its robustness to the imperfections, i.e., detuning and coupling variation, involved in the reflection process. These good features make it a useful building block in long distance quantum communication.