All-photonic one-way quantum repeaters
Daoheng Niu,1, 2 Yuxuan Zhang,1, 2 Alireza Shabani,3and Hassan Shapourian1
1Cisco Quantum Lab, San Jose, CA 95134, USA
2Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA
3Cisco Quantum Lab, Los Angeles, CA 90049, USA
Quantum repeater is the key technology enabler for long-distance quantum communication. To
date, most of the existing quantum repeater protocols are designed based on specific quantum
codes or graph states. In this paper, we propose a general framework for all-photonic one-way
quantum repeaters based on the measurement-based error correction, which can be adapted to any
Calderbank-Shor-Steane code including the recently discovered quantum low density parity check
(QLDPC) codes. We present a novel decoding scheme, where the error correction process is carried
out at the destination based on the accumulated data from the measurements made across the net-
work. This procedure not only outperforms the conventional protocols with independent repeaters
but also simplifies the local quantum operations at repeaters. As an example, we numerically show
that the [[48,6,8]] generalized bicycle code (as a small but efficient QLDPC code) has an equally
good performance while reducing the resources by at least an order of magnitude.
I. INTRODUCTION
Quantum network is one of the key quantum technolo-
gies and plays a central role in enabling unconditionally
secure communication, distributed quantum computing,
and quantum sensing [1,2]. Being an active area of
research, the exact requirements and applications of a
large-scale quantum network remain to be better under-
stood. At the fundamental level nevertheless, a putative
quantum network needs to provide a way for quantum
communication, i.e., transfer of quantum information,
among different network nodes where photons constitute
the medium of choice. Realizing a large-scale quantum
network requires transmitting quantum information over
long distances, that is challenging due to the photon loss
which grows exponentially with distance. To circumvent
this issue, quantum repeaters have been proposed [3],
and there have been tremendous efforts over the past
decade [4–18]. The basic idea is to place a number of re-
peater stations at intermediate distances and use quan-
tum correlations in multi-qubit entangled states to effec-
tively enhance the transmission rate between two distant
nodes.
Quantum repeater protocols are generally divided into
two categories: The first category [3,4] is based on the
heralded quantum entanglement distribution, where a
pairwise entanglement between adjacent repeater nodes
is established so that a long-range entanglement between
the end nodes can be achieved via the entanglement
swapping, i.e., performing Bell state measurement at
each intermediate node. Quantum information is then
transferred via the quantum teleportation. The success
of a teleportation attempt relies on successfully estab-
lishing entanglement links between neighboring nodes
and performing Bell measurements. Hence, a two-way
classical channel is required to communicate the success
of both processes to the adjacent nodes for every iter-
ation. Two-way communication limits the performance
of these protocols and may necessitate long-lived quan-
tum memories at repeater stations, although the latter
requirement in principle can be relaxed in all-photonic
schemes [10,11]. The second category of repeater proto-
cols [12–17] involves sending encoded quantum informa-
tion in the form of multi-qubit loss tolerant states which
are received and (typically) error corrected at intermedi-
ate repeater stations. Such protocols only involve one-
way communication and hence their performance is not
impacted by the two-way communication requirement in
the first category. Furthermore, the one-way protocols
are far more efficient than the two-way protocols when
it comes to network traffic in a large scale quantum net-
work.
In this paper, we introduce an all-photonic architecture
for one-way quantum repeaters based on stabilizer codes
realized by graph states of photons, where the photon loss
is treated as a qubit erasure error and corrected through
a measurement-based error correction scheme. Our pro-
posed architecture provides a general formalism that can
be adapted to any Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) stabi-
lizer code. In particular, one can leverage the remarkable
properties (including large code distance) of the recently
developed quantum low-density parity check (QLDPC)
codes [19,20] in this formalism. We should contrast
our repeater protocol with previous code-specific pro-
tocols such as those based on the quantum parity code
(QPC) [11–16], where a teleportation-based error correc-
tion is performed to deal with erasure and possible op-
erational errors, or other protocols based on tree graph
states [17,18,21], which can be viewed as teleportation
path multiplexers. Our repeater architecture in short in-
volves encoding logical qubits in a graph state of photons
corresponding to a CSS code and performing logical Bell
state measurements at each repeater. The classical infor-
mation obtained from measurement outcomes (which also
contains loss events) is not processed until received by the
recipient party who performs the error correction [22,23]
across the quantum network based on the accumulated
data (See Fig. 1). This feature is fundamentally different
from conventional methods, where the error correction is
performed at every repeater node, and offers several ad-
arXiv:2210.10071v1 [quant-ph] 18 Oct 2022