Optically-Heralded Entanglement of Superconducting Systems in Quantum Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel optical heralding method for entangling superconducting quantum systems, overcoming previous coupling and noise challenges, and simplifying quantum network connections.

Contribution

It introduces an end-to-end entanglement scheme using heralding with a detected photon, bypassing the limitations of cascaded transducers.

Findings

Breaks rate-fidelity trade-off in entanglement generation

Unifies entanglement methods across different quantum modalities

Enhances scalability of superconducting quantum networks

Abstract

Networking superconducting quantum computers is a longstanding challenge in quantum science. The typical approach has been to cascade transducers: converting to optical frequencies at the transmitter and to microwave frequencies at the receiver. However, the small microwave-optical coupling and added noise have proven formidable obstacles. Instead, we propose optical networking via heralding end-to-end entanglement with one detected photon and teleportation. In contrast to cascaded direct transduction, our scheme absorbs the low optical-microwave coupling efficiency into the heralding step, thus breaking the rate-fidelity trade-off. Moreover, this technique unifies and simplifies entanglement generation between superconducting devices and other physical modalities in quantum networks.