Complete analysis of a realistic fiber-based quantum repeater scheme

Abstract: We present a quantum repeater protocol for distributing entanglement over long distances, where a dedicated communication stage enables trial rates not limited by the travel time between repeater nodes. To accomplish this, each node contains several qubits that can couple to one single-photon emitter. Photons from the emitters generate heralded entanglement between qubits in neighboring nodes. The protocol leaves the emitters disentangled from the rest of the system immediately after emitting the photons, thus allowing them to be reused to entangle other qubits without waiting for the repeater link round-trip time. This time multiplexing increases the protocol trial rate by up to an order of magnitude. The protocol is then combined with conventional deterministic entanglement swapping and heralded entanglement purification to extend the entanglement distance and reduce the entanglement error, respectively. We perform a complete protocol analysis by considering all relevant error sources, such as initialization, two-qubit gate, and qubit measurement errors, as well as the exponential decoherence of the qubits with time. The latter is particularly important since we analyze the protocol performance for a broad range of experimental parameters and obtain secret key rates ranging from $1 \rightarrow 1000$ Hz at a distance of $1000$ km. Our results suggest that it is important to reach a qubit memory coherence time of around one second, and two-qubit gate and measurement errors in the order of $10^{-3}$ to obtain reasonable secret key rates over distances longer than achievable with direct transmission. While this work focuses on optimizing secret key rates, the protocol can also be used for EPR pair generation and is thus also relevant for, e.g., distributed quantum computing.