Protocols for All-Photonic Quantum Repeaters
Naphan Benchasattabuse, Michal Hajdušek, Rodney Van Meter · 2023
All-photonic repeater scheme based on a repeater graph state (RGS) promises tolerance to photon losses as well as operational errors. An attractive promise of this scheme is that it offers a fast Bell pair generation rate, limited only by the RGS creation time. This is in stark contrast to the traditional quantum repeater with quantum memories, where the Bell pair generation time is limited by the round-trip wait time leading to poor Bell pair generation performance and quality due to the decoherence of quantum memories. Prior research has focused on lowering the cost of RGS generation and improving upon the probabilistic generation to a deterministic generation with required photon counts to be the same as the number of qubits in the RGS. The operations of creating and manipulating the RGS into an end-to-end Bell pair are complex and have not been fully figured out in detail. Here, we focus on improving the practicality of the RGS scheme in real-world implementation and address three open questions of the RGS scheme, namely; how do end nodes participate in the connection, what classical information needs to be exchanged and processed between nodes, and how to make RGS scheme work hand in hand with the traditional quantum repeaters with memories.