Rate-Fidelity Tradeoffs in All-Photonic and Memory-Equipped Quantum Switches

TL;DR

This paper compares all-photonic and memory-equipped quantum switches, analyzing their rate-fidelity tradeoffs to guide design choices for quantum networks based on hardware and protocol parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a formal benchmarking methodology for quantum switch architectures, quantifies their performance tradeoffs, and identifies optimal operating regions.

Findings

Memory-equipped switches can achieve higher rates with heralding.

All-photonic switches avoid decoherence but have lower efficiency.

Optimal architecture depends on hardware and protocol parameters.

Abstract

Quantum entanglement switches are a key building block for early quantum networks, and a central design question is whether near-term devices should use only flying photons or also incorporate quantum memories. We compare two architectures: an all-photonic entanglement generation switch (EGS) that repeatedly attempts Bell-state measurements (BSM) without storing qubits, and a quantum memory-equipped switch that buffers entanglement and triggers measurements only when heralded connectivity is available (herald-then-swap control). These two designs trade off simple, memoryless operation that avoids decoherence and memory-induced latency against heralding-based control that buffers entanglement to use BSMs more efficiently. We formalize both models under a common hardware abstraction and characterize their achievable rate-fidelity regions, yielding a benchmarking methodology that translates hardware and protocol parameters into network-level performance. Numerical evaluation quantifies the rate-fidelity tradeoffs of both models, identifies operating regions in which each architecture dominates, and shows how hardware and protocol knobs can be tuned to meet application-specific targets.