Deterministic generation of all-photonic quantum repeaters from solid-state emitters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deterministic protocol for creating large all-photonic quantum repeater states using solid-state emitters, significantly reducing resource requirements and enhancing resilience to photon loss.

Contribution

It presents a novel deterministic method for generating large photonic repeater states with only two coupled emitters, improving scalability and robustness over probabilistic approaches.

Findings

Arbitrarily large repeater states can be generated with two emitters.

The protocol reduces photon source requirements by six orders of magnitude.

Built-in redundancy makes the system resilient to photon loss.

Abstract

Quantum repeaters are nodes in a quantum communication network that allow reliable transmission of entanglement over large distances. It was recently shown that highly entangled photons in so-called graph states can be used for all-photonic quantum repeaters, which require substantially fewer resources compared to atomic-memory based repeaters. However, standard approaches to building multi-photon entangled states through pairwise probabilistic entanglement generation severely limit the size of the state that can be created. Here, we present a protocol for the deterministic generation of large photonic repeater states using quantum emitters such as semiconductor quantum dots and defect centers in solids. We show that arbitrarily large repeater states can be generated using only two coupled emitters, reducing the necessary number of photon sources by six orders of magnitude. Our protocol includes a built-in redundancy which makes it resilient to photon loss.