Architecture and protocols for all-photonic quantum repeaters
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An all-photonic repeater scheme based on a type of graph state called a repeater graph state (RGS) promises tolerance to photon losses as well as operational errors, and offers a fast Bell pair generation rate, limited only by the RGS creation time (rather than enforced round-trip waits). Prior research on the topic has focused on the RGS generation and analyzing the secret key sharing rate, but there is a need to extend to use cases such as distributed computation or teleportation as will be used in a general-purpose Quantum Internet. Here, we propose a protocol and architecture that consider how end nodes participate in the connection; the capabilities and responsibilities of each node; the classical communications between nodes; and the Pauli frame correction information per end-to-end Bell pair. We give graphical reasoning on the correctness of the protocol via graph state manipulation rules. We then show that the RGS scheme is well suited to use in a link architecture connecting memory-based repeaters and end nodes for applications beyond secret sharing. Finally, we discuss the practicality of implementing our proposed protocol on quantum network simulators and how it can be integrated into an existing proposed quantum network architecture.
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