Implementation of bipartite or remote unitary gates with repeater nodes

TL;DR

This paper introduces protocols for implementing bipartite and single-qubit unitaries in quantum networks with repeater nodes, optimizing total operation time amid noisy channels and decoherence, and compares their efficiency to existing methods.

Contribution

It presents new protocols for remote unitary implementation using repeater nodes without prior entanglement, reducing total operation time compared to traditional methods.

Findings

Protocols using piecewise entanglement often require less total time.

Total time approaches direct signal transfer as repeater nodes increase.

Lower bounds on total time are established for small numbers of repeaters.

Abstract

We propose some protocols to implement various classes of bipartite unitary operations on two remote parties with the help of repeater nodes in-between. We also present a protocol to implement a single-qubit unitary with parameters determined by a remote party with the help of up to three repeater nodes. It is assumed that the neighboring nodes are connected by noisy photonic channels, and the local gates can be performed quite accurately, while the decoherence of memories is significant. A unitary is often a part of a larger computation or communication task in a quantum network, and to reduce the amount of decoherence in other systems of the network, we focus on the goal of saving the total time for implementing a unitary including the time for entanglement preparation. We review some previously studied protocols that implement bipartite unitaries using local operations and classical communication and prior shared entanglement, and apply them to the situation with repeater nodes without prior entanglement. We find that the protocols using piecewise entanglement between neighboring nodes often require less total time compared to preparing entanglement between the two end nodes first and then performing the previously known protocols. For a generic bipartite unitary, as the number of repeater nodes increases, the total time could approach the time cost for direct signal transfer from one end node to the other. We also prove some lower bounds of the total time when there are a small number of repeater nodes. The application to position-based cryptography is discussed.