Rethinking Quantum Networking with Advances in Fiber Technology

TL;DR

This paper compares hollow-core fiber technology with conventional fibers in quantum repeater networks, demonstrating that HCF significantly enhances performance and expands design options for long-distance quantum communication.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive performance analysis of HCF versus SMF in quantum networks, highlighting the potential of HCF to improve key rates and reduce infrastructure costs.

Findings

HCF outperforms SMF in secret-key rate across various regimes.

Memory-native transmission with HCF yields up to tenfold rate improvements.

HCF enables larger repeater spacing, reducing hardware requirements.

Abstract

Recent comparisons of quantum repeater protocols have highlighted the strong near-term potential of multiplexed two-way architectures for long-distance quantum communication. At the same time, advances in hollow-core fiber (HCF) technology motivate a re-examination of the physical transmission medium as an architectural lever in quantum network design. In this work, we compare emerging anti-resonant HCFs against conventional silica single-mode fibers (SMFs) in multiplexed two-way quantum repeater networks. We evaluate their performance under both telecom and memory-native transmission, accounting for frequency-conversion overheads, coupling efficiencies, memory decoherence, and operational noise. We find that HCF significantly outperforms SMF across a wide range of regimes. With memory-native transmission, HCF yields up to an order of magnitude improvement in secret-key rate per channel use under realistic conversion efficiencies. Even at telecom wavelengths, HCF enables larger optimal repeater spacing, improving rate--cost tradeoffs and reducing repeater requirements. We further quantify the role of memory quality, hardware efficiency, detector and conversion losses, and two-qubit gate noise in shaping these gains. These results show that recent advances in HCF materially expand the design space of practical terrestrial quantum repeater networks.