Improving the Rate-Loss Scaling in Polarization Entanglement Distribution using Single-Click Entanglement Swapping

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental method to surpass the traditional rate-loss scaling in polarization entanglement distribution by combining hybrid entanglement and single-click swapping, achieving a square root improvement.

Contribution

The authors introduce a simple protocol that integrates hybrid entanglement and single-click swapping to improve rate-loss scaling in polarization entanglement distribution.

Findings

Achieved a fidelity of 0.843 in entangled photon pairs.

Demonstrated square root improvement in rate-loss scaling.

Realized a protocol comparable to a 1-hop quantum repeater.

Abstract

Polarization entanglement is widely used in optical quantum information processing due to its compatibility with standard optical components. On the other hand, it is known that polarization entanglement is susceptible to the loss, more precisely, its transmission rate in a lossy channel is limited by the scaling of O({\eta}), where {\eta} is a transmittance of the channel. Here, we experimentally demonstrate that this rate-loss scaling limit can be overcome by a relatively simple protocol. This is possible by integrating the idea of the polarizaion-photon-number hybrid entanglement and the single-click entanglement swapping. We demonstrate square root improvement of the rate-loss scaling from the conventional approaches and achieve the fidelity of 0.843 for the distributed polarization entangled photon pairs. This improvement in the rate-loss scaling is equivalent to that achieved by 1-hop quantum repeater node. Our result paves a way to build a near-future quantum network and its applications.