2019/06/24 by Zheng-Da Li, Rui Zhang, Xu-Fei Yin +11 · 3 citations
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Photonics #Quantum #Quantum Computing Algorithms and Architecture #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum computer #Quantum entanglement #Quantum network #Quantum optics and atomic interactions #Quantum sensor #Quantum technology #Repeater (horology) #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41566-019-0468-5
Published online in Nature Photonics
openalex publication_date 2019/06/24 · openalex created_date 2019/07/12 · arxiv created 2019/08/14 · arxiv updated 2019/08/16 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Quantum repeaters -- important components of a scalable quantum internet -- enable the entanglement to be distributed over long distances. The standard paradigm for a quantum repeater relies on a necessary demanding requirement of quantum memory. Despite significant progress, the limited performance of quantum memory makes practical quantum repeaters still a great challenge. Remarkably, a proposed all-photonic quantum repeater avoids the need for quantum memory by harnessing the graph states in the repeater nodes. Here we perform an experimental demonstration of an all-photonic quantum repeater using linear optics. By manipulating a 12-photon interferometer, we implement a 2-by-2 parallel all-photonic quantum repeater, and observe an 89% enhancement of entanglement-generation rate over the standard parallel entanglement swapping. These results open a new way towards designing repeaters with efficient single-photon sources and photonic graph states, and suggest that the all-photonic scheme represents an alternative path -- parallel to that of matter-memory-based schemes -- towards realizing practical quantum repeaters.