Experimental demonstration of memory-enhanced scaling for entanglement connection of quantum repeater segments

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates how long-lived quantum memories can significantly improve the efficiency and scalability of entanglement connection in quantum repeater segments, advancing the development of large-scale quantum networks.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental demonstration of memory-enhanced scaling in entanglement connection for quantum repeaters using atomic quantum memories with tens of milliseconds storage time.

Findings

Memory enhancement accelerates entanglement connection rate.

Efficient entanglement swapping achieved with atomic quantum memories.

Demonstrates a key advantage for future large-scale quantum networks.

Abstract

The quantum repeater protocol is a promising approach to implement long-distance quantum communication and large-scale quantum networks. A key idea of the quantum repeater protocol is to use long-lived quantum memories to achieve efficient entanglement connection between different repeater segments with a polynomial scaling. Here we report an experiment which realizes efficient connection of two quantum repeater segments via on-demand entanglement swapping by the use of two atomic quantum memories with storage time of tens of milliseconds. With the memory enhancement, scaling-changing acceleration is demonstrated in the rate for a successful entanglement connection. The experimental realization of entanglement connection of two quantum repeater segments with an efficient memory-enhanced scaling demonstrates a key advantage of the quantum repeater protocol, which makes a cornerstone towards future large-scale quantum networks.