An Improved Design for All-Photonic Quantum Repeaters

Abstract

All-photonic quantum repeaters use multi-qubit photonic graph states, called repeater graph states (RGS), instead of matter-based quantum memories, for protection against predominantly loss errors. The RGS comprises tree-graph-encoded logical qubits for error correction at the repeaters and physical {\em link} qubits to create entanglement between neighboring repeaters. The two methods to generate the RGS are probabilistic stitching -- using linear optical Bell state measurements (fusion) -- of small entangled states prepared via multiplexed-probabilistic linear optical circuits fed with single photons, and a direct deterministic preparation using a small number of quantum-logic-capable solid-state emitters. The resource overhead due to fusions and the circuit depth of the quantum emitter system both increase with the size of the RGS. Therefore engineering a resource-efficient RGS is crucial. We propose a new RGS design, which achieves a higher entanglement rate for all-photonic quantum repeaters using fewer qubits than the previously known RGS would. We accomplish this by boosting the probability of entangling neighboring repeaters with tree-encoded link qubits. We also propose a new adaptive scheme to perform logical BSM on the link qubits for loss-only errors. The adaptive BSM outperforms the previous schemes for logical BSM on tree codes when the qubit loss probability is uniform. It reduces the number of optical modes required to perform logical BSM on link qubits to improve the entanglement rate further.